title: Elephant

text: A male elephant's testes are located internally near the kidneys. The elephant's penis can reach a length of and a diameter of at the base. It is S-shaped when fully erect and has a Y-shaped orifice. The female has a well-developed clitoris at up to . The vulva is located between the hind legs instead of near the tail as in most mammals. Determining pregnancy status can be difficult due to the animal's large abdominal cavity. The female's mammary glands occupy the space between the front legs, which puts the suckling calf within reach of the female's trunk. Elephants have a unique organ, the temporal gland, located in both sides of the head. This organ is associated with sexual behaviour, and males secrete a fluid from it when in musth. Females have also been observed with secretions from the temporal glands.


title: Elephant

text: Elephants are homeotherms, and maintain their average body temperature at ~ 36 °C, with minimum 35.2 °C during cool season, and maximum 38.0 °C during hot dry season. Sweat glands are absent in the elephant's skin, but water diffuses through the skin, allowing cooling by evaporative loss. Other physiological or behavioral features may assist with thermoregulation such as flapping ears, mud bathing, spraying water on the skin, seeking shade, and adopting different walking patterns. In addition, the interconnected crevices in the elephant's skin is thought to impede dehydration and improve thermal regulation over a long period of time.


title: Elephant

text: The African bush elephant can be found in habitats as diverse as dry savannahs, deserts, marshes, and lake shores, and in elevations from sea level to mountains above the snow line. Forest elephants mainly live in equatorial forests but will enter gallery forests and ecotones between forests and savannahs. Asian elephants prefer areas with a mix of grasses, low woody plants, and trees, primarily inhabiting dry thorn-scrub forests in southern India and Sri Lanka and evergreen forests in Malaya. Elephants are herbivorous and will eat leaves, twigs, fruit, bark, grass and roots. They are born with sterile intestines and require bacteria obtained from their mother's feces to digest vegetation. African elephants are mostly browsers while Asian elephants are mainly grazers. They can consume as much as of food and of water in a day. Elephants tend to stay near water sources. Major feeding bouts take place in the morning, afternoon and night. At midday, elephants rest under trees and may doze off while standing. Sleeping occurs at night while the animal is lying down. Elephants average 3–4 hours of sleep per day. Both males and family groups typically move a day, but distances as far as have been recorded in the Etosha region of Namibia. Elephants go on seasonal migrations in search of food, water, minerals, and mates. At Chobe National Park, Botswana, herds travel to visit the river when the local waterholes dry up.


title: Elephant

text: Because of their large size, elephants have a huge impact on their environments and are considered keystone species. Their habit of uprooting trees and undergrowth can transform savannah into grasslands; when they dig for water during drought, they create waterholes that can be used by other animals. They can enlarge waterholes when they bathe and wallow in them. At Mount Elgon, elephants excavate caves that are used by ungulates, hyraxes, bats, birds and insects. Elephants are important seed dispersers; African forest elephants ingest and defecate seeds, with either no effect or a positive effect on germination. The seeds are typically dispersed in large amounts over great distances. In Asian forests, large seeds require giant herbivores like elephants and rhinoceros for transport and dispersal. This ecological niche cannot be filled by the next largest herbivore, the tapir. Because most of the food elephants eat goes undigested, their dung can provide food for other animals, such as dung beetles and monkeys. Elephants can have a negative impact on ecosystems. At Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda, the overabundance of elephants has threatened several species of small birds that depend on woodlands. Their weight can compact the soil, which causes the rain to run off, leading to erosion.


title: Elephant

text: Elephants typically coexist peacefully with other herbivores, which will usually stay out of their way. Some aggressive interactions between elephants and rhinoceros have been recorded. At Aberdare National Park, Kenya, a rhino attacked an elephant calf and was killed by the other elephants in the group. At Hluhluwe–Umfolozi Game Reserve, South Africa, introduced young orphan elephants went on a killing spree that claimed the lives of 36 rhinos during the 1990s, but ended with the introduction of older males. The size of adult elephants makes them nearly invulnerable to predators. Calves may be preyed on by lions, spotted hyenas, and wild dogs in Africa and tigers in Asia. The lions of Savuti, Botswana, have adapted to hunting elephants, mostly calves, juveniles or even sub-adults, during the dry season, and a pride of 30 lions has been normally recorded killing juvenile individuals between the ages of four and eleven years, and a young bull of about 15 years in an exceptional case. There are rare reports of adult Asian elephants falling prey to tigers. Elephants appear to distinguish between the growls of larger predators like tigers and smaller predators like leopards (which have not been recorded killing calves); they react to leopards less fearfully and more aggressively. Elephants tend to have high numbers of parasites, particularly nematodes, compared to other herbivores. This is due to lower predation pressures that would otherwise kill off many of the individuals with significant parasite loads.


title: Elephant

text: Female elephants spend their entire lives in tight-knit matrilineal family groups, some of which are made up of more than ten members, including three mothers and their dependent offspring, and are led by the matriarch which is often the eldest female. She remains leader of the group until death or if she no longer has the energy for the role; a study on zoo elephants showed that when the matriarch died, the levels of faecal corticosterone ('stress hormone') dramatically increased in the surviving elephants. When her tenure is over, the matriarch's eldest daughter takes her place; this occurs even if her sister is present. One study found that younger matriarchs are more likely than older ones to under-react to severe danger. Family groups may split after becoming too large for the available resources.


title: Elephant

text: The social circle of the female elephant does not necessarily end with the small family unit. In the case of elephants in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, a female's life involves interaction with other families, clans, and subpopulations. Families may associate and bond with each other, forming what are known as bond groups which typically made of two family groups. During the dry season, elephant families may cluster together and form another level of social organisation known as the clan. Groups within these clans do not form strong bonds, but they defend their dry-season ranges against other clans. There are typically nine groups in a clan. The Amboseli elephant population is further divided into the "central" and "peripheral" subpopulations.


title: Elephant

text: Some elephant populations in India and Sri Lanka have similar basic social organisations. There appear to be cohesive family units and loose aggregations. They have been observed to have "nursing units" and "juvenile-care units". In southern India, elephant populations may contain family groups, bond groups and possibly clans. Family groups tend to be small, consisting of one or two adult females and their offspring. A group containing more than two adult females plus offspring is known as a "joint family". Malay elephant populations have even smaller family units and do not have any social organisation higher than a family or bond group. Groups of African forest elephants typically consist of one adult female with one to three offspring. These groups appear to interact with each other, especially at forest clearings.


title: Elephant

text: The social life of the adult male is very different. As he matures, a male spends more time at the edge of his group and associates with outside males or even other families. At Amboseli, young males spend over 80% of their time away from their families when they are 14–15. When males permanently leave, they either live alone or with other males. The former is typical of bulls in dense forests. Asian males are usually solitary, but occasionally form groups of two or more individuals; the largest consisted of seven bulls. Larger bull groups consisting of over 10 members occur only among African bush elephants, the largest of which numbered up to 144 individuals. Bulls only return to the herd to breed or to socialize, they do not provide prenatal care to their offspring but rather play a fatherly role to younger bulls to show dominance.


title: Elephant

text: Male elephants can be quite sociable when not competing for dominance or mates, and will form long-term relationships. A dominance hierarchy exists among males, whether they range socially or solitarily. Dominance depends on the age, size and sexual condition, and when in groups, males follow the lead of the dominant bull. Young bulls may seek out the company and leadership of older, more experienced males, whose presence appears to control their aggression and prevent them from exhibiting "deviant" behaviour. Adult males and females come together for reproduction. Bulls associate with family groups if an oestrous cow is present.


title: Elephant

text: Adult males enter a state of increased testosterone known as musth. In a population in southern India, males first enter musth at the age of 15, but it is not very intense until they are older than 25. At Amboseli, bulls under 24 do not go into musth, while half of those aged 25–35 and all those over 35 do. Young bulls appear to enter musth during the dry season (January–May), while older bulls go through it during the wet season (June–December). The main characteristic of a bull's musth is a fluid secreted from the temporal gland that runs down the side of his face. He may urinate with his penis still in his sheath, which causes the urine to spray on his hind legs. Behaviours associated with musth include walking with the head held high and swinging, picking at the ground with the tusks, marking, rumbling and waving only one ear at a time. This can last from a day to four months.


title: Elephant

text: Males become extremely aggressive during musth. Size is the determining factor in agonistic encounters when the individuals have the same condition. In contests between musth and non-musth individuals, musth bulls win the majority of the time, even when the non-musth bull is larger. A male may stop showing signs of musth when he encounters a musth male of higher rank. Those of equal rank tend to avoid each other. Agonistic encounters typically consist of threat displays, chases, and minor sparring with the tusks. Serious fights are rare.


title: Elephant

text: Elephants are polygynous breeders, and copulations are most frequent during the peak of the wet season. A cow in oestrus releases chemical signals (pheromones) in her urine and vaginal secretions to signal her readiness to mate. A bull will follow a potential mate and assess her condition with the flehmen response, which requires the male to collect a chemical sample with his trunk and bring it to the vomeronasal organ. The oestrous cycle of a cow lasts 14–16 weeks with a 4–6-week follicular phase and an 8- to 10-week luteal phase. While most mammals have one surge of luteinizing hormone during the follicular phase, elephants have two. The first (or anovulatory) surge, could signal to males that the female is in oestrus by changing her scent, but ovulation does not occur until the second (or ovulatory) surge. Fertility rates in cows decline around 45–50 years of age.


title: Elephant

text: Bulls engage in a behaviour known as mate-guarding, where they follow oestrous females and defend them from other males. Most mate-guarding is done by musth males, and females actively seek to be guarded by them, particularly older ones. Thus these bulls have more reproductive success. Musth appears to signal to females the condition of the male, as weak or injured males do not have normal musths. For young females, the approach of an older bull can be intimidating, so her relatives stay nearby to provide support and reassurance. During copulation, the male lays his trunk over the female's back. The penis is very mobile, being able to move independently of the pelvis. Before mounting, it curves forward and upward. Copulation lasts about 45 seconds and does not involve pelvic thrusting or ejaculatory pause. Elephant sperm must swim close to to reach the egg. By comparison, human sperm has to swim around only .


title: Elephant

text: Homosexual behaviour is frequent in both sexes. As in heterosexual interactions, this involves mounting. Male elephants sometimes stimulate each other by playfighting and "championships" may form between old bulls and younger males. Female same-sex behaviours have been documented only in captivity where they are known to masturbate one another with their trunks.


title: Elephant

text: Gestation in elephants typically lasts around two years with interbirth intervals usually lasting four to five years. Births tend to take place during the wet season. Calves are born tall and weigh around . Typically, only a single young is born, but twins sometimes occur. The relatively long pregnancy is maintained by five corpus luteums (as opposed to one in most mammals) and gives the foetus more time to develop, particularly the brain and trunk. As such, newborn elephants are precocial and quickly stand and walk to follow their mother and family herd. A new calf is usually the centre of attention for herd members. Adults and most of the other young will gather around the newborn, touching and caressing it with their trunks. For the first few days, the mother is intolerant of other herd members near her young. Alloparenting – where a calf is cared for by someone other than its mother – takes place in some family groups. Allomothers are typically two to twelve years old.


title: Elephant

text: For the first few days, the newborn is unsteady on its feet and needs the support of its mother. It relies on touch, smell, and hearing, as its eyesight is poor. It has little precise control over its trunk, which wiggles around and may cause it to trip. By its second week of life, the calf can walk more firmly and has more control over its trunk. After its first month, a calf can pick up, hold, and put objects in its mouth, but cannot suck water through the trunk and must drink directly through the mouth. It is still dependent on its mother and keeps close to her.


title: Elephant

text: For its first three months, a calf relies entirely on milk from its mother for nutrition, after which it begins to forage for vegetation and can use its trunk to collect water. At the same time, improvements in lip and leg coordination occur. Calves continue to suckle at the same rate as before until their sixth month, after which they become more independent when feeding. By nine months, mouth, trunk and foot coordination is perfected. After a year, a calf's abilities to groom, drink, and feed itself are fully developed. It still needs its mother for nutrition and protection from predators for at least another year. Suckling bouts tend to last 2–4 min/hr for a calf younger than a year and it continues to suckle until it reaches three years of age or older. Suckling after two years may serve to maintain growth rate, body condition and reproductive ability.


title: Elephant

text: Play behaviour in calves differs between the sexes; females run or chase each other while males play-fight. The former are sexually mature by the age of nine years while the latter become mature around 14–15 years. Adulthood starts at about 18 years of age in both sexes. Elephants have long lifespans, reaching 60–70 years of age. Lin Wang, a captive male Asian elephant, lived for 86 years.


title: Elephant

text: Touching is an important form of communication among elephants. Individuals greet each other by stroking or wrapping their trunks; the latter also occurs during mild competition. Older elephants use trunk-slaps, kicks, and shoves to discipline younger ones. Individuals of any age and sex will touch each other's mouths, temporal glands, and genitals, particularly during meetings or when excited. This allows individuals to pick up chemical cues. Touching is especially important for mother–calf communication. When moving, elephant mothers will touch their calves with their trunks or feet when side-by-side or with their tails if the calf is behind them. If a calf wants to rest, it will press against its mother's front legs and when it wants to suckle, it will touch her breast or leg.


title: Elephant

text: Visual displays mostly occur in agonistic situations. Elephants will try to appear more threatening by raising their heads and spreading their ears. They may add to the display by shaking their heads and snapping their ears, as well as throwing dust and vegetation. They are usually bluffing when performing these actions. Excited elephants may raise their trunks. Submissive ones will lower their heads and trunks, as well as flatten their ears against their necks, while those that accept a challenge will position their ears in a V shape.


title: Elephant

text: Elephants produce several vocalisations, usually through the larynx, though some may be modified by the trunk. These include trumpets, roars, barks, snorts, growls and rumbles which may be produced for either short or long range communication. Elephants may produce infrasonic rumbles. For Asian elephants, these calls have a frequency of 14–24 Hz, with sound pressure levels of 85–90 dB and last 10–15 seconds. For African elephants, calls range from 15 to 35 Hz with sound pressure levels as high as 117 dB, allowing communication for many kilometres, with a possible maximum range of around .


title: Elephant

text: Elephants are known to communicate with seismics, vibrations produced by impacts on the earth's surface or acoustical waves that travel through it. An individual running or mock charging can create seismic signals that can be heard at travel distances of up to . Seismic waveforms produced from predator alarm calls travel .


title: Elephant

text: Elephants exhibit mirror self-recognition, an indication of self-awareness and cognition that has also been demonstrated in some apes and dolphins. One study of a captive female Asian elephant suggested the animal was capable of learning and distinguishing between several visual and some acoustic discrimination pairs. This individual was even able to score a high accuracy rating when re-tested with the same visual pairs a year later. Elephants are among the species known to use tools. An Asian elephant has been observed modifying branches and using them as flyswatters. Tool modification by these animals is not as advanced as that of chimpanzees. Elephants are popularly thought of as having an excellent memory. This could have a factual basis; they possibly have cognitive maps to allow them to remember large-scale spaces over long periods of time. Individuals appear to be able to keep track of the current location of their family members.


title: Elephant

text: Scientists debate the extent to which elephants feel emotion. They appear to show interest in the bones of their own kind, regardless of whether they are related. As with chimpanzees and dolphins, a dying or dead elephant may elicit attention and aid from others, including those from other groups. This has been interpreted as expressing "concern"; however, others would dispute such an interpretation as being anthropomorphic; the "Oxford Companion to Animal Behaviour" (1987) advised that "one is well advised to study the behaviour rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion".


title: Elephant

text: African bush elephants were listed as Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2021, and African forest elephants were listed as Critically Endangered in the same year. In 1979, Africa had an estimated minimum population of 1.3 million elephants, with a possible upper limit of 3.0 million. By 1989, the population was estimated to be 609,000; with 277,000 in Central Africa, 110,000 in eastern Africa, 204,000 in southern Africa, and 19,000 in western Africa. About 214,000 elephants were estimated to live in the rainforests, fewer than had previously been thought. From 1977 to 1989, elephant populations declined by 74% in East Africa. After 1987, losses in elephant numbers accelerated, and savannah populations from Cameroon to Somalia experienced a decline of 80%. African forest elephants had a total loss of 43%. Population trends in southern Africa were mixed, with anecdotal reports of losses in Zambia, Mozambique and Angola while populations grew in Botswana and Zimbabwe and were stable in South Africa. Conversely, studies in 2005 and 2007 found populations in eastern and southern Africa were increasing by an average annual rate of 4.0%. The IUCN estimated that total population in Africa is estimated at around to 415,000 individuals for both species combined as of 2016.


title: Elephant

text: African elephants receive at least some legal protection in every country where they are found, but 70% of their range exists outside protected areas. Successful conservation efforts in certain areas have led to high population densities. As of 2008, local numbers were controlled by contraception or translocation. Large-scale cullings ceased in 1988 when Zimbabwe abandoned the practice. In 1989, the African elephant was listed under Appendix I by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), making trade illegal. Appendix II status (which allows restricted trade) was given to elephants in Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe in 1997 and South Africa in 2000. In some countries, sport hunting of the animals is legal; Botswana, Cameroon, Gabon, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have CITES export quotas for elephant trophies. In June 2016, the First Lady of Kenya, Margaret Kenyatta, helped launch the East Africa Grass-Root Elephant Education Campaign Walk, organised by elephant conservationist Jim Nyamu. The event was conducted to raise awareness of the value of elephants and rhinos, to help mitigate human-elephant conflicts, and to promote anti-poaching activities.


title: Elephant

text: In 2020, the IUCN listed the Asian elephant as endangered due to an almost 50% population decline over "the last three generations". Asian elephants once ranged from Syria and Iraq (the subspecies "Elephas maximus asurus"), to China (up to the Yellow River) and Java. It is now extinct in these areas, and the current range of Asian elephants is highly fragmented. The total population of Asian elephants is estimated to be around 40,000–50,000, although this may be a loose estimate. Around 60% of the population is in India. Although Asian elephants are declining in numbers overall, particularly in Southeast Asia, the population in the Western Ghats appears to be increasing.


title: Elephant

text: The poaching of elephants for their ivory, meat and hides has been one of the major threats to their existence. Historically, numerous cultures made ornaments and other works of art from elephant ivory, and its use rivalled that of gold. The ivory trade contributed to the African elephant population decline in the late 20th century. This prompted international bans on ivory imports, starting with the United States in June 1989, and followed by bans in other North American countries, western European countries, and Japan. Around the same time, Kenya destroyed all its ivory stocks. CITES approved an international ban on ivory that went into effect in January 1990. Following the bans, unemployment rose in India and China, where the ivory industry was important economically. By contrast, Japan and Hong Kong, which were also part of the industry, were able to adapt and were not badly affected. Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Malawi wanted to continue the ivory trade and were allowed to, since their local elephant populations were healthy, but only if their supplies were from elephants that had been culled or died of natural causes.


title: Elephant

text: The ban allowed the elephant to recover in parts of Africa. In January 2012, 650 elephants in Bouba Njida National Park, Cameroon, were killed by Chadian raiders. This has been called "one of the worst concentrated killings" since the ivory ban. Asian elephants are potentially less vulnerable to the ivory trade, as females usually lack tusks. Still, members of the species have been killed for their ivory in some areas, such as Periyar National Park in India. China was the biggest market for poached ivory but announced they would phase out the legal domestic manufacture and sale of ivory products in May 2015, and in September 2015, China and the United States said "they would enact a nearly complete ban on the import and export of ivory" due to causes of extinction.


title: Elephant

text: Other threats to elephants include habitat destruction and fragmentation. The Asian elephant lives in areas with some of the highest human populations and may be confined to small islands of forest among human-dominated landscapes. Elephants commonly trample and consume crops, which contributes to conflicts with humans, and both elephants and humans have died by the hundreds as a result. Mitigating these conflicts is important for conservation. One proposed solution is the protection of wildlife corridors which gave the animals greater space and maintain the long term viability of large populations.


title: Elephant

text: Elephants have been working animals since at least the Indus Valley civilization and continue to be used in modern times. There were 13,000–16,500 working elephants employed in Asia in 2000. These animals are typically captured from the wild when they are 10–20 years old when they can be trained quickly and easily, and will have a longer working life. They were traditionally captured with traps and lassos, but since 1950, tranquillisers have been used.


title: Elephant

text: Individuals of the Asian species have been often trained as working animals. Asian elephants perform tasks such as hauling loads into remote areas, moving logs to rivers and roads, transporting tourists around national parks, pulling wagons, and leading religious processions. In northern Thailand, the animals are used to digest coffee beans for Black Ivory coffee. They are valued over mechanised tools because they can work in relatively deep water, require relatively little maintenance, need only vegetation and water as fuel and can be trained to memorise specific tasks. Elephants can be trained to respond to over 30 commands. Musth bulls can be difficult and dangerous to work with and are chained and semi-starved until the condition passes. In India, many working elephants are alleged to have been subject to abuse. They and other captive elephants are thus protected under The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960.


title: Elephant

text: In both Myanmar and Thailand, deforestation and other economic factors have resulted in sizable populations of unemployed elephants resulting in health problems for the elephants themselves as well as economic and safety problems for the people amongst whom they live.


title: Elephant

text: The practice of working elephants has also been attempted in Africa. The taming of African elephants in the Belgian Congo began by decree of Leopold II of Belgium during the 19th century and continues to the present with the Api Elephant Domestication Centre.


title: Elephant

text: Historically, elephants were considered formidable instruments of war. They were equipped with armour to protect their sides, and their tusks were given sharp points of iron or brass if they were large enough. War elephants were trained to grasp an enemy soldier and toss him to the person riding on them or to pin the soldier to the ground and impale him.


title: Elephant

text: One of the earliest references to war elephants is in the Indian epic "Mahabharata" (written in the 4th century BC, but said to describe events between the 11th and 8th centuries BC). They were not used as much as horse-drawn chariots by either the Pandavas or Kauravas. During the Magadha Kingdom (which began in the 6th century BC), elephants began to achieve greater cultural importance than horses, and later Indian kingdoms used war elephants extensively; 3,000 of them were used in the Nandas (5th and 4th centuries BC) army while 9,000 may have been used in the Mauryan army (between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC). The "Arthashastra" (written around 300 BC) advised the Mauryan government to reserve some forests for wild elephants for use in the army, and to execute anyone who killed them. From South Asia, the use of elephants in warfare spread west to Persia and east to Southeast Asia. The Persians used them during the Achaemenid Empire (between the 6th and 4th centuries BC) while Southeast Asian states first used war elephants possibly as early as the 5th century BC and continued to the 20th century.


title: Elephant

text: In his 326 B.C. Indian campaign, Alexander the Great confronted elephants for the first time and suffered heavy casualties. Among the reasons for the refusal of the rank-and-file Macedonian soldiers to continue the Indian conquest were rumors of even larger elephant armies in India. Alexander trained his foot soldiers to injure the animals and cause them to panic during wars with both the Persians and Indians. Ptolemy, who was one of Alexander's generals, used corps of Asian elephants during his reign as the ruler of Egypt (which began in 323 BC). His son and successor Ptolemy II (who began his rule in 285 BC) obtained his supply of elephants further south in Nubia. From then on, war elephants were employed in the Mediterranean and North Africa throughout the classical period. The Greek king Pyrrhus used elephants in his attempted invasion of Rome in 280 BC. While they frightened the Roman horses, they were not decisive and Pyrrhus ultimately lost the battle. The Carthaginian general Hannibal took elephants across the Alps during his war with the Romans and reached the Po Valley in 217 BC with all of them alive, but they later succumbed to disease.


title: Elephant

text: Overall, elephants owed their initial successes to the element of surprise and to the fear that their great size invoked. With time, strategists devised counter-measures and war elephants turned into an expensive liability and were hardly ever used by Romans and Parthians.


title: Elephant

text: Elephants were historically kept for display in the menageries of Ancient Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome. The Romans in particular pitted them against humans and other animals in gladiator events. In the modern era, elephants have traditionally been a major part of zoos and circuses around the world. In circuses, they are trained to perform tricks. The most famous circus elephant was probably Jumbo (1861 – 15 September 1885), who was a major attraction in the Barnum & Bailey Circus. These animals do not reproduce well in captivity, due to the difficulty of handling musth bulls and limited understanding of female oestrous cycles. Asian elephants were always more common than their African counterparts in modern zoos and circuses. After CITES listed the Asian elephant under Appendix I in 1975, the number of African elephants in zoos increased in the 1980s, although the import of Asians continued. Subsequently, the US received many of its captive African elephants from Zimbabwe, which had an overabundance of the animals.


title: Elephant

text: Keeping elephants in zoos has met with some controversy. Proponents of zoos argue that they offer researchers easy access to the animals and provide money and expertise for preserving their natural habitats, as well as safekeeping for the species. Critics claim that the animals in zoos are under physical and mental stress. Elephants have been recorded displaying stereotypical behaviours in the form of swaying back and forth, trunk swaying, or route tracing. This has been observed in 54% of individuals in UK zoos. Elephants in European zoos appear to have shorter lifespans than their wild counterparts at only 17 years, although other studies suggest that zoo elephants live as long those in the wild.


title: Elephant

text: The use of elephants in circuses has also been controversial; the Humane Society of the United States has accused circuses of mistreating and distressing their animals. In testimony to a US federal court in 2009, Barnum & Bailey Circus CEO Kenneth Feld acknowledged that circus elephants are struck behind their ears, under their chins and on their legs with metal-tipped prods, called bull hooks or ankus. Feld stated that these practices are necessary to protect circus workers and acknowledged that an elephant trainer was reprimanded for using an electric shock device, known as a hot shot or electric prod, on an elephant. Despite this, he denied that any of these practices harm elephants. Some trainers have tried to train elephants without the use of physical punishment. Ralph Helfer is known to have relied on gentleness and reward when training his animals, including elephants and lions. Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey circus retired its touring elephants in May 2016.


title: Elephant

text: Elephants can exhibit bouts of aggressive behaviour and engage in destructive actions against humans. In Africa, groups of adolescent elephants damaged homes in villages after cullings in the 1970s and 1980s. Because of the timing, these attacks have been interpreted as vindictive. In parts of India, male elephants regularly enter villages at night, destroying homes and killing people. Elephants killed around 300 people between 2000 and 2004 in Jharkhand while in Assam, 239 people were reportedly killed between 2001 and 2006.


title: Elephant

text: Local people have reported their belief that some elephants were drunk during their attacks, although officials have disputed this explanation. Purportedly drunk elephants attacked an Indian village a second time in December 2002, killing six people, which led to the killing of about 200 elephants by locals.


title: Elephant

text: In many cultures, elephants represent strength, power, wisdom, longevity, stamina, leadership, sociability, nurturance and loyalty. Several cultural references emphasise the elephant's size and exotic uniqueness. For instance, a "white elephant" is a byword for something expensive, useless, and bizarre. The expression "elephant in the room" refers to an obvious truth that is ignored or otherwise unaddressed. The story of the blind men and an elephant teaches that reality can be observed from different perspectives.


title: Elephant

text: Elephants have been represented in art since Paleolithic times. Africa, in particular, contains many rock paintings and engravings of the animals, especially in the Sahara and southern Africa. In Asia, the animals are depicted as motifs in Hindu and Buddhist shrines and temples. Elephants were often difficult to portray by people with no first-hand experience of them. The ancient Romans, who kept the animals in captivity, depicted anatomically accurate elephants on mosaics in Tunisia and Sicily. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, when Europeans had little to no access to the animals, elephants were portrayed more like fantasy creatures. They were often depicted with horse- or bovine-like bodies with trumpet-like trunks and tusks like a boar; some were even given hooves. Elephants were commonly featured in motifs by the stonemasons of the Gothic churches. As more elephants began to be sent to European kings as gifts during the 15th century, depictions of them became more accurate, including one made by Leonardo da Vinci. Despite this, some Europeans continued to portray them in a more stylised fashion. Max Ernst's 1921 surrealist painting, "The Elephant Celebes," depicts an elephant as a silo with a trunk-like hose protruding from it.


title: Elephant

text: Elephants have been the subject of religious beliefs. The Mbuti people of central Africa believe that the souls of their dead ancestors resided in elephants. Similar ideas existed among other African societies, who believed that their chiefs would be reincarnated as elephants. During the 10th century AD, the people of Igbo-Ukwu, near the Niger Delta, buried their leaders with elephant tusks. The animals' religious importance is only totemic in Africa but is much more significant in Asia. In Sumatra, elephants have been associated with lightning. Likewise in Hinduism, they are linked with thunderstorms as Airavata, the father of all elephants, represents both lightning and rainbows. One of the most important Hindu deities, the elephant-headed Ganesha, is ranked equal with the supreme gods Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma. Ganesha is associated with writers and merchants and it is believed that he can give people success as well as grant them their desires. In Buddhism, Buddha is said to have been a white elephant reincarnated as a human. In Islamic tradition, the year 570 when Muhammad was born is known as the Year of the Elephant. Elephants were thought to be religious themselves by the Romans, who believed that they worshipped the sun and stars.


title: Elephant

text: Elephants are ubiquitous in Western popular culture as emblems of the exotic, especially since – as with the giraffe, hippopotamus and rhinoceros – there are no similar animals familiar to Western audiences. The use of the elephant as a symbol of the U.S. Republican Party began with an 1874 cartoon by Thomas Nast. As characters, elephants are most common in children's stories, in which they are generally cast as models of exemplary behaviour. They are typically surrogates for humans with ideal human values. Many stories tell of isolated young elephants returning to a close-knit community, such as "The Elephant's Child" from Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories", Disney's "Dumbo," and Kathryn and Byron Jackson's "The Saggy Baggy Elephant". Other elephant heroes given human qualities include Jean de Brunhoff's Babar, David McKee's Elmer, and Dr. Seuss's Horton.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The Chicxulub crater () is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore near the community of Chicxulub, after which it is named. It was formed slightly over 66 million years ago when a large asteroid, about in diameter, struck Earth. The crater is estimated to be in diameter and in depth. It is the second largest confirmed impact structure on Earth, and the only one whose peak ring is intact and directly accessible for scientific research.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The crater was discovered by Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield, geophysicists who had been looking for petroleum in the Yucatán Peninsula during the late 1970s. Penfield was initially unable to obtain evidence that the geological feature was a crater and gave up his search. Later, through contact with Alan R. Hildebrand in 1990, Penfield obtained samples that suggested it was an impact feature. Evidence for the crater's impact origin includes shocked quartz, a gravity anomaly, and tektites in surrounding areas.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The date of the impact coincides with the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (commonly known as the K–Pg or K–T boundary). It is now widely accepted that the resulting devastation and climate disruption was the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, a mass extinction of 75% of plant and animal species on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: In the late 1970s, geologist Walter Alvarez and his father, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Luis Walter Alvarez, put forth their theory that the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction was caused by an impact event. The main evidence of such an impact was contained in a thin layer of clay present in the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary (K–Pg boundary) in Gubbio, Italy. The Alvarezes and colleagues reported that it contained an abnormally high concentration of iridium, a chemical element rare on Earth but common in asteroids. Iridium levels in this layer were as much as 160 times above the background level. It was hypothesized that the iridium was spread into the atmosphere when the impactor was vaporized and settled across Earth's surface among other material thrown up by the impact, producing the layer of iridium-enriched clay. At the time, there was no consensus on what caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction and the boundary layer, with theories including a nearby supernova, climate change, or a geomagnetic reversal. The Alvarezes' impact hypothesis was rejected by many paleontologists, who believed that the lack of fossils found close to the K–Pg boundary—the "three-meter problem"—suggested a more gradual die-off of fossil species.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The Alvarezes, joined by Frank Asaro and Helen Michel from University of California, Berkeley, published their paper on the iridium anomaly in "Science" in June 1980. Their paper was followed by other reports of similar iridium spikes at the K–Pg boundary across the globe, and sparked wide interest in the cause of the K–Pg extinction; over 2,000 papers were published in the 1980s on the topic. There were no known impact craters that were the right age and size, spurring a search for a suitable candidate. Recognizing the scope of the work, Lee Hunt and Lee Silver organized a cross-discipline meeting in Snowbird, Utah, in 1981. Unknown to them, evidence of the crater they were looking for was being presented the same week, and would be largely missed by the scientific community.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: In 1978, geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo were working for the Mexican state-owned oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) as part of an airborne magnetic survey of the Gulf of Mexico north of the Yucatán Peninsula. Penfield's job was to use geophysical data to scout possible locations for oil drilling. In the offshore magnetic data, Penfield noted anomalies whose depth he estimated and mapped. He then obtained onshore gravity data from the 1940s. When the gravity maps and magnetic anomalies were compared, Penfield described a shallow "bullseye", in diameter, appearing on the otherwise non-magnetic and uniform surroundings—clear evidence to him of an impact feature. A decade earlier, the same map had suggested a crater to contractor Robert Baltosser, but Pemex corporate policy prevented him from publicizing his conclusion.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: Penfield presented his findings to Pemex, who rejected the crater theory, instead deferring to findings that ascribed the feature to volcanic activity. Pemex disallowed release of specific data, but let Penfield and Camargo present the results at the 1981 Society of Exploration Geophysicists conference. That year's conference was under-attended and their report attracted scant attention, with many experts on impact craters and the K–Pg boundary attending the Snowbird conference instead. Carlos Byars, a "Houston Chronicle" journalist who was familiar with Penfield and had seen the gravitational and magnetic data himself, wrote a story on Penfield and Camargo's claim, but the news did not disseminate widely.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: Although Penfield had plenty of geophysical data sets, he had no rock cores or other physical evidence of an impact. He knew Pemex had drilled exploratory wells in the region. In 1951, one bored into what was described as a thick layer of andesite about down. This layer could have resulted from the intense heat and pressure of an Earth impact, but at the time of the borings it was dismissed as a lava dome—a feature uncharacteristic of the region's geology. Penfield was encouraged by William C. Phinney, curator of the lunar rocks at the Johnson Space Center, to find these samples to support his hypothesis. Penfield tried to secure site samples, but was told they had been lost or destroyed. When attempts to return to the drill sites to look for corroborating rocks proved fruitless, Penfield abandoned his search, published his findings and returned to his Pemex work. Seeing the 1980 "Science" paper, Penfield wrote to Walter Alvarez about the Yucatán structure, but received no response.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: Alvarez and other scientists continued their search for the crater, although they were searching in oceans based on incorrect analysis of glassy spherules from the K–Pg boundary that suggested the impactor had landed in open water. Unaware of Penfield's discovery, University of Arizona graduate student Alan R. Hildebrand and faculty adviser William V. Boynton looked for a crater near the Brazos River in Texas. Their evidence included greenish-brown clay with surplus iridium, containing shocked quartz grains and small weathered glass beads that looked to be tektites. Thick, jumbled deposits of coarse rock fragments were also present, thought to have been scoured from one place and deposited elsewhere by an impact event. Such deposits occur in many locations but seemed concentrated in the Caribbean Basin at the K–Pg boundary. When Haitian professor Florentine Morás discovered what he thought to be evidence of an ancient volcano on Haiti, Hildebrand suggested it could be a telltale feature of a nearby impact. Tests on samples retrieved from the K–Pg boundary revealed more tektite glass, formed only in the heat of asteroid impacts and high-yield nuclear detonations.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: In 1990, Carlos Byars told Hildebrand of Penfield's earlier discovery of a possible impact crater. Hildebrand contacted Penfield and the pair soon secured two drill samples from the Pemex wells, which had been stored in New Orleans for decades. Hildebrand's team tested the samples, which clearly showed shock-metamorphic materials. A team of California researchers surveying satellite images found a cenote (sinkhole) ring centered on the town of Chicxulub Puerto that matched the one Penfield saw earlier; the cenotes were thought to be caused by subsidence of bolide-weakened lithostratigraphy around the impact crater wall. More recent evidence suggests the crater is wide, and the ring is an inner wall of it. Hildebrand, Penfield, Boynton, Camargo, and others published their paper identifying the crater in 1991. The crater was named for the nearby town of Chicxulub. Penfield also recalled that part of the motivation for the name was "to give the academics and NASA naysayers a challenging time pronouncing it" after years of dismissing its existence.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: In March 2010, forty-one experts from many countries reviewed the available evidence: twenty years' worth of data spanning a variety of fields. They concluded that the impact at Chicxulub triggered the mass extinctions at the K–Pg boundary. Dissenters, notably Gerta Keller of Princeton University, have proposed an alternate culprit: the eruption of the Deccan Traps in what is now the Indian subcontinent. This period of intense volcanism occurred before and after the Chicxulub impact; dissenting studies argue that the worst of the volcanic activity occurred "before" the impact, and the role of the Deccan Traps was instead shaping the evolution of surviving species post-impact. A 2013 study compared isotopes in impact glass from the Chicxulub impact with isotopes in ash from the K–Pg boundary, concluding that they were dated almost exactly the same within experimental error.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: A 2013 study published in "Science" estimated the age of the impact as 66,043,000 ± 11,000 years ago (± 43,000 years ago considering systematic error), based on multiple lines of evidence, including argon–argon dating of tektites from Haiti and bentonite horizons overlying the impact horizon in northeastern Montana, United States. This date was supported by a 2015 study based on argon–argon dating of tephra found in lignite beds in the Hell Creek and overlying Fort Union formations in northeastern Montana. A 2018 study based on argon–argon dating of spherules from Gorgonilla Island, Colombia, obtained a slightly different result of 66,051,000 ± 31,000 years ago. The impact has been interpreted to have occurred in Northern Hemisphere spring based on annual isotope curves in sturgeon and paddlefish bones found in an ejecta-bearing sedimentary unit at the Tanis site in southwestern North Dakota. This sedimentary unit is thought to have formed within hours of impact. A 2020 study concluded that the Chicxulub crater was formed by an inclined (45–60° to horizontal) impact from the northeast. The site of the crater at the time of impact was a marine carbonate platform. The water depth at the impact site varied from on the western edge of the crater to over on the northeastern edge. The seafloor rocks consisted of a sequence of Jurassic–Cretaceous marine sediments, thick. They were predominantly carbonate rock, including dolomite (35–40% of total sequence) and limestone (25–30%), along with evaporites (anhydrite 25–30%), and minor amounts of shale and sandstone (3–4%) underlain by approximately of continental crust, composed of igneous crystalline basement including granite.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: There is broad consensus that the Chicxulub impactor was an asteroid with a carbonaceous chondrite composition, rather than a comet. In 1998, a meteorite was described from the North Pacific from sediments spanning the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary; it was suggested to represent a fragment of the Chicxulub impactor. Analysis suggested that it best fitted the criteria of the CV, CO and CR groups of carbonaceous chondrites. A 2021 paper suggested, based on geochemical evidence including the excess of chromium isotope Cr and the ratios of platinum group metals found in marine impact layers, that the impactor was either a CM or CR carbonaceous chondrite C-type asteroid. The impactor was around in diameter—large enough that, if set at sea level, it would have reached taller than Mount Everest.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The impactor's velocity was estimated at . The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at . The impact created winds in excess of near the blast's center, and created a transient cavity wide and deep that later collapsed. This formed a crater mainly under the sea and covered by of sediment by the 21st century. The impact, expansion of water after filling the crater, and related seismic activity spawned megatsunamis over tall, with one simulation suggesting the immediate waves from the impact may have reached up to high. The waves scoured the sea floor, leaving ripples underneath what is now Louisiana with average wavelengths of and average wave heights of , the largest ripples documented. Material shifted by subsequent earthquakes and the waves reached to what are now Texas and Florida, and may have disturbed sediments as far as from the impact site. The impact triggered a seismic event with an estimated magnitude of 9–11 at the impact site.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: A cloud of hot dust, ash and steam would have spread from the crater, with as much as 25 trillion metric tons of excavated material being ejected into the atmosphere by the blast. Some of this material escaped orbit, dispersing throughout the Solar System, while some of it fell back to Earth, heated to incandescence upon re-entry. The rock heated Earth's surface and ignited wildfires, estimated to have enveloped nearly 70% of the planet's forests. The devastation to living creatures even hundreds of kilometers away was immense, and much of present-day Mexico and the United States would have been devastated. Fossil evidence for an instantaneous extinction of diverse animals was found in a soil layer only thick in New Jersey, away from the impact site, indicating that death and burial under debris occurred suddenly and quickly over wide distances on land. Field research from the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota published in 2019 shows the simultaneous mass extinction of myriad species combined with geological and atmospheric features consistent with the impact event.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: Due to the relatively shallow water, the rock that was vaporized included sulfur-rich gypsum from the lower part of the Cretaceous sequence, and this was injected into the atmosphere. This global dispersal of dust and sulfates would have led to a sudden and catastrophic effect on the climate worldwide, instigating large temperature drops and devastating the food chain. The researchers stated that the impact generated an environmental calamity that extinguished life, but it also induced a vast subsurface hydrothermal system that became an oasis for the recovery of life. Researchers using seismic images of the crater in 2008 determined that the impactor landed in deeper water than previously assumed, which may have resulted in increased sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere, due to more water vapor being available to react with the vaporized anhydrite. This could have made the impact even deadlier by cooling the climate and generating acid rain.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The emission of dust and particles could have covered the entire surface of Earth for several years, possibly a decade, creating a harsh environment for living things. Production of carbon dioxide caused by the destruction of carbonate rocks would have led to a sudden greenhouse effect. Over a decade or longer, sunlight would have been blocked from reaching the surface of Earth by the dust particles in the atmosphere, cooling the surface dramatically. Photosynthesis by plants would also have been interrupted, affecting the entire food chain. A model of the event developed by Lomax et al (2001) suggests that net primary productivity rates may have increased to higher than pre-impact levels over the long term because of the high carbon dioxide concentrations.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: A long-term local effect of the impact was the creation of the Yucatán sedimentary basin which "ultimately produced favorable conditions for human settlement in a region where surface water is scarce".


title: Chicxulub crater

text: Two seismic reflection datasets have been acquired over the offshore parts of the crater since its discovery. Older 2D seismic datasets have also been used that were originally acquired for hydrocarbon exploration. A set of three long-record 2D lines was acquired in October 1996, with a total length of , by the BIRPS group. The longest of the lines, Chicx-A, was shot parallel to the coast, while Chicx-B and Chicx-C were shot NW–SE and SSW–NNE respectively. In addition to the conventional seismic reflection imaging, data was recorded onshore to allow wide-angle refraction imaging.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: In 2005, another set of profiles was acquired, bringing the total length of 2D deep-penetration seismic data up to . This survey also used ocean bottom seismometers and land stations to allow 3D travel time inversion to improve the understanding of the velocity structure of the crater. The data was concentrated around the interpreted offshore peak ring to help identify possible drilling locations. At the same time, gravity data were acquired along of profiles. The acquisition was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) with logistical assistance from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Centro de Investigación Científica de Yucatán (CICY – Yucatán Center for Scientific Investigation).


title: Chicxulub crater

text: Intermittent core samples from hydrocarbon exploration boreholes drilled by Pemex on the Yucatán peninsula have provided some useful data. UNAM drilled a series of eight fully-cored boreholes in 1995, three of which penetrated deeply enough to reach the ejecta deposits outside the main crater rim, UNAM-5, 6 and 7. In 2001–2002, a scientific borehole was drilled near the Hacienda Yaxcopoil, known as Yaxcopoil-1 (or more commonly Yax-1), to a depth of below the surface, as part of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program. The borehole was cored continuously, passing through of impactites. Three fully-cored boreholes were also drilled by the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (Federal Electricity Commission) with UNAM. One of them, (BEV-4), was deep enough to reach the ejecta deposits.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: In 2016, a joint United Kingdom–United States team obtained the first offshore core samples, from the peak ring in the central zone of the crater with the drilling of the borehole known as M0077A, part of Expedition 364 of the International Ocean Discovery Program. The borehole reached below the seafloor.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The form and structure (morphology) of the Chicxulub crater is known mainly from geophysical data. It has a well-defined concentric multi-ring structure. The outermost ring was identified using seismic reflection data. It is up to from the crater center, and is a ring of normal faults, throwing down towards the crater center, marking the outer limit of significant crustal deformation. This makes it one of the three largest impact structures on Earth. Moving into the center, the next ring is the main crater rim, also known as the "inner rim" which correlates with ring of cenotes onshore and a major circular Bouguer gravity gradient anomaly. This has a radius that varies between . The next ring structure, moving inwards, is the peak ring. The area between the inner rim and peak ring is described as the "terrace zone", characterized by a series of fault blocks defined by normal faults dipping towards the crater center, sometimes referred to as "slump blocks". The peak ring is about 80 km in diameter and of variable height, from above the base of the crater in the west and northwest and in the north, northeast and east. The central part of the crater lies above a zone where the mantle was uplifted such that the Moho is shallower by about compared to regional values.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The ring structures are best developed to the south, west and northwest, becoming more indistinct towards the north and northeast of the structure. This is interpreted to be a result of variable water depth at the time of impact, with less well-defined rings resulting from the areas with water depths significantly deeper than .


title: Chicxulub crater

text: Before the impact, the geology of the Yucatán area, sometimes referred to as the "target rocks", consisted of a sequence of mainly Cretaceous limestones, overlying red beds of uncertain age above an unconformity with the dominantly granitic basement. The basement forms part of the Maya Block and information about its makeup and age in the Yucatán area has come only from drilling results around the Chicxulub crater and the analysis of basement material found as part of the ejecta at more distant K–Pg boundary sites. The Maya block is one of a group of crustal blocks found at the edge of the Gondwana continent. Zircon ages are consistent with the presence of an underlying Grenville age crust, with large amounts of late Ediacaran arc-related igneous rocks, interpreted to have formed in the Pan-African orogeny. Late Paleozoic granitoids (the distinctive "pink granite") were found in the peak ring borehole M0077A, with an estimated age of 326 ± 5 million years ago (Carboniferous). These have an adakitic composition and are interpreted to represent the effects of slab detachment during the Marathon-Ouachita orogeny, part of the collision between Laurentia and Gondwana that created the Pangaea supercontinent.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: Red beds of variable thickness, up to , overlay the granitic basement, particularly in the southern part of the area. These continental clastic rocks are thought to be of Triassic-to-Jurassic age, although they may extend into the Lower Cretaceous. The lower part of the Lower Cretaceous sequence consists of dolomite with interbedded anhydrite and gypsum, with the upper part being limestone, with dolomite and anhydrite in part. The thickness of the Lower Cretaceous varies from up to in the boreholes. The Upper Cretaceous sequence is mainly platform limestone, with marl and interbedded anhydrite. It varies in thickness from up to . There is evidence for a Cretaceous basin within the Yucatán area that has been named the Yucatán Trough, running approximately south–north, widening northwards, explaining the observed thickness variations.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The most common observed impact rocks are suevites, found in many of the boreholes drilled around the Chicxulub crater. Most of the suevites were resedimented soon after the impact by the resurgence of oceanic water into the crater. This gave rise to a layer of suevite extending from the inner part of the crater out as far as the outer rim.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: Impact melt rocks are thought to fill the central part of the crater, with a maximum thickness of . The samples of melt rock that have been studied have overall compositions similar to that of the basement rocks, with some indications of mixing with carbonate source, presumed to be derived from the Cretaceous carbonates. An analysis of melt rocks sampled by the M0077A borehole indicates two types of melt rock, an upper impact melt (UIM), which has a clear carbonate component as shown by its overall chemistry and the presence of rare limestone clasts and a lower impact melt-bearing unit (LIMB) that lacks any carbonate component. The difference between the two impact melts is interpreted to be a result of the upper part of the initial impact melt, represented by the LIMB in the borehole, becoming mixed with materials from the shallow part of the crust either falling back into the crater or being brought back by the resurgence forming the UIM.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The "pink granite", a granitoid rich in alkali feldspar found in the peak ring borehole shows many deformation features that record the extreme strains associated with the formation of the crater and the subsequent development of the peak ring. The granitoid has an unusually low density and P-wave velocity compared to typical granitic basement rocks. Study of the core from M0077A shows the following deformation features in apparent order of development: pervasive fracturing along and through grain boundaries, a high density of shear faults, bands of cataclasite and ultra-cataclasite and some ductile shear structures. This deformation sequence is interpreted to result from initial crater formation involving acoustic fluidization followed by shear faulting with the development of cataclasites with fault zones containing impact melts.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The peak ring drilling below the sea floor also discovered evidence of a massive hydrothermal system, which modified approximately of Earth's crust and lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. These hydrothermal systems may provide support for the impact origin of life hypothesis for the Hadean eon, when the entire surface of Earth was affected by impactors much larger than the Chicxulub impactor.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: After the immediate effects of the impact had stopped, sedimentation in the Chicxulub area returned to the shallow water platform carbonate depositional environment that characterised it before the impact. The sequence, which dates back as far as the Paleocene, consists of marl and limestone, reaching a thickness of about . The K–Pg boundary inside the crater is significantly deeper than in the surrounding area.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: On the Yucatán peninsula, the inner rim of the crater is marked by clusters of cenotes, which are the surface expression of a zone of preferential groundwater flow, moving water from a recharge zone in the south to the coast through a karstic aquifer system. From the cenote locations, the karstic aquifer is clearly related to the underlying crater rim, possibly through higher levels of fracturing,


title: Chicxulub crater

text: In September 2007, a report published in "Nature" proposed an origin for the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater. The authors, William F. Bottke, David Vokrouhlický, and David Nesvorný, argued that a collision in the asteroid belt 160 million years ago between a 170 km (106 mi) diameter parent body and another 60 km (37 mi) diameter body, resulted in the Baptistina family of asteroids, the largest surviving member of which is 298 Baptistina. They proposed that the "Chicxulub asteroid" was also a member of this group.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The Baptistina family is not considered a likely source of the Chicxulub asteroid because a spectrographic analysis published in 2009 revealed that 298 Baptistina has a different composition more typical of an S-type asteroid than the presumed carbonaceous chondrite composition of the Chicxulub impactor. In 2011, data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer revised the date of the collision which created the Baptistina family to about 80 million years ago. This made an asteroid from this family highly improbable to be the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater, as typically the process of resonance and collision of an asteroid takes many tens of millions of years. In 2010, another hypothesis implicated the newly discovered asteroid 354P/LINEAR, a member of the Flora family of asteroids, as a possible remnant cohort of the K–Pg impactor. In July 2021, a study reported that the impactor likely originated in the outer main part of the asteroid belt, based on numerical simulations.


title: Chicxulub crater

text: The original 1980 paper describing the crater suggested that it was created by an asteroid around in diameter. Two papers published in 1984 proposed the impactor to be a comet originating from the Oort cloud, and it was proposed in 1992 that tidal disruption of comets could potentially increase impact rates. In February 2021, four independent laboratories reported elevated concentrations of iridium in the crater's peak ring, further corroborating the asteroid impact hypothesis. In the same month, Avi Loeb and a colleague published a study in "Scientific Reports" suggesting the impactor was a fragment from a disrupted comet, rather than an asteroid—the long-standing leading candidate among scientists. This was followed by a rebuttal published in "Astronomy & Geophysics" that June, which charged that the paper ignored the fact that the mass of iridium deposited across the globe by the impact (estimated to be approximately 2.0–2.8 × 10 grams), was too large to be created by a comet impactor the size required to create the crater, and that Loeb et al. had overestimated likely comet impact rates. They found that an asteroid impactor was strongly favored by all available evidence, and that a comet impactor could be effectively ruled out.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is a regional intergovernmental organization in Eurasia. It was formed following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. It covers an area of and has an estimated population of 239,796,010. The CIS encourages cooperation in economic, political and military affairs and has certain powers relating to the coordination of trade, finance, lawmaking, and security. It has also promoted cooperation on cross-border crime prevention.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: As the Soviet Union disintegrated, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine signed the Belovezh Accords on 8 December 1991, declaring that the Union had effectively ceased to exist and proclaimed the CIS in its place. On 21 December, the Alma-Ata Protocol was signed. The Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), which regard their membership in the Soviet Union as an illegal occupation, chose not to participate. Georgia withdrew its membership in 2008 following the Russo-Georgian War. Ukraine formally ended its participation in CIS statutory bodies in 2018, although it had stopped participating in the organization much earlier.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: Eight of the nine CIS member states participate in the CIS Free Trade Area. Three organizations originated from the CIS, namely the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union (alongside subdivisions, the Eurasian Customs Union and the Eurasian Economic Space); and the Union State. While the first and the second are military and economic alliances, the third aims to reach a supranational union of Russia and Belarus with a common government, currency, and so on.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: The CIS as a shared Russophone social, cultural, and economic space has its origins with the Russian Empire, which was replaced in 1917 by the Russian Republic after the February Revolution earlier that year. Following the October Revolution, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic became the leading republic in the Soviet Union (USSR) upon its creation with the 1922 Treaty and Declaration of the Creation of the USSR along with Byelorussian SSR, Ukrainian SSR and Transcaucasian SFSR. In March 1991, amidst Perestroika and a rising political crisis in the country, Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union, proposed a federation by holding a referendum to preserve the Union as a union of sovereign republics. The new treaty signing never happened as the Communist Party hardliners staged an attempted coup in Moscow August that year.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: Following the events of a failed coup, many republics of the USSR declared their independence fearing another coup. A week after the Ukrainian independence referendum was held, which kept the chances of the Soviet Union staying together low, the Commonwealth of Independent States was founded in its place on 8 December 1991 by the Byelorussian SSR, the Russian SFSR, and the Ukrainian SSR, when the leaders of the three republics met at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha Natural Reserve, about north of Brest in Belarus, and signed the "Agreement Establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States", known as the Belovezh Accords ().


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: The CIS announced that the new organization would be open to all republics of the former Soviet Union, and to other nations sharing the same goals. The CIS charter stated that all the members were sovereign and independent nations and thereby effectively abolished the Soviet Union. On 21 December 1991, the leaders of eight additional former Soviet Republics (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) signed the Alma-Ata Protocol which can either be interpreted as expanding the CIS to these states or the proper foundation or foundation date of the CIS, thus bringing the number of participating countries to 11. Georgia joined two years later, in December 1993. At this point, 12 of the 15 former Soviet Republics participated in the CIS. The three Baltic states did not, reflecting their governments' and people's view that the post-1940 Soviet occupation of their territory was illegitimate. The CIS and Soviet Union also legally co-existed briefly with each other until 26 December 1991, when the Soviet of the Republics formally dissolved the Soviet Union. This was followed by Ivan Korotchenya becoming Executive Secretary of the CIS on the same day.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: After the end of the dissolution process of the Soviet Union, Russia and the Central Asian republics were weakened economically and faced declines in GDP. Post-Soviet states underwent economic reforms and privatisation. The process of Eurasian integration began immediately after the break-up of the Soviet Union to salvage economic ties with Post-Soviet republics.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: On 22 January 1993, the Charter (Statutes) of the CIS were signed, setting up the different institutions of the CIS, their functions, the rules and statutes of the CIS. The Charter also defined that all countries have ratified the Agreement on the Establishment of the CIS and its relevant (Alma-Ata) Protocol would be considered to be founding states of the CIS, as well as those only countries ratifying the Charter would be considered to be member states of the CIS (art. 7). Other states can participate as associate members or observers if accepted as such by a decision of the Council of Heads of State to the CIS (art. 8). All the founding states, apart from Ukraine and Turkmenistan, ratified the Charter of the CIS and became member states of it. Nevertheless, Ukraine and Turkmenistan kept participating in the CIS, without being member states of it. Ukraine became an associate member of the CIS Economic Union in April 1994, and Turkmenistan became an associate member of the CIS in August 2005. Georgia left the CIS altogether in 2009 and Ukraine stopped participating in 2018.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: During a speech at Moscow State University in 1994, the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, suggested the idea of creating a "common defense" space within the CIS. Nazarbayev's idea was quickly seen as a way to bolster trade, boost investments in the region, and serve as a counterweight to the West and East Asia.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: Between 2003 and 2005, three CIS member states experienced a change of government in a series of colour revolutions: Eduard Shevardnadze was overthrown in Georgia; Viktor Yushchenko was elected in Ukraine; and Askar Akayev was toppled in Kyrgyzstan. In February 2006, Georgia withdrew from the Council of Defense Ministers, with the statement that "Georgia has taken a course to join NATO and it cannot be part of two military structures simultaneously", but it remained a full member of the CIS until August 2009, one year after officially withdrawing in the immediate aftermath of the Russo-Georgian War. In March 2007, Igor Ivanov, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, expressed his doubts concerning the usefulness of the CIS, emphasizing that the Eurasian Economic Community was becoming a more competent organization to unify the largest countries of the CIS. Following the withdrawal of Georgia, the presidents of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan skipped the October 2009 meeting of the CIS, each having their own issues and disagreements with the Russian Federation.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: The Council of Foreign Ministers met in Dushanbe, Tajikistan on 11 April 2003 to discuss the war in Iraq and consider a draft program for the fight against terrorism and extremism, highlighting the particular need for an international role in post-war Iraq, to be further addressed at the May summit in St. Petersburg.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: In May 2009, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine joined the Eastern Partnership, a project which was initiated by the European Union (EU).


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: The Creation Agreement remained the main constituent document of the CIS until January 1993, when the "CIS Charter" (, "Ustav") was adopted. The charter formalized the concept of membership: a member country is defined as a country that ratifies the CIS Charter (sec. 2, art. 7). Parties to CIS Creation Agreement but not the Charter are considered to be "The Founding States" but not full members.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: Two states, Ukraine and Turkmenistan, have ratified the CIS Creation Agreement, making them "founding states of the CIS", but did not ratify the subsequent Charter that would make them members of the CIS. These states, while not being formal members of the CIS, were allowed to participate in CIS. They were also allowed to participate in various CIS initiatives, e.g. the Commonwealth of Independent States Free Trade Area, which were, however, formulated mostly as independent multilateral agreements, and not as internal CIS agreements. Additionally, Ukraine became an associate member state of the CIS Economic Union in 1994 and Turkmenistan an associate member state of the CIS in 2005. However, the Verkhovna Rada did not ratify the agreement on associate membership in accordance with the CIS Charter. As a result, "De jure" Ukraine only had the status of a "founding state", without even being an associate member.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: Turkmenistan has not ratified the Charter and therefore is not formally a member of the CIS. Nevertheless, it has consistently participated in the CIS as if it were a member state. Turkmenistan changed its CIS standing to associate member as of 26 August 2005. The cited reason was to be consistent with its 1995-proclaimed, UN-recognised, international neutrality status, but experts have cited the country no longer needing Russia to provide natural gas access, as well as the country's declining faith in the confederation's ability to maintain internal stability in light of the Colour Revolutions.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: Although Ukraine was one of the states which ratified the Creation Agreement in December 1991, making it a Founding State of the CIS, it chose not to ratify the CIS Charter as it disagrees with Russia being the only legal successor state to the Soviet Union. Thus it has never been a full member of the CIS. However, Ukraine kept participating in the CIS, despite not being a member. In 1993, Ukraine became an associate member of the Economic Union of the CIS.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: Following the Russian military intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, relations between Ukraine and Russia deteriorated, leading Ukraine to consider ending its participation in the CIS. As Ukraine never ratified the Charter, it could cease its informal participation in the CIS. However, to fully terminate its relationship with the CIS, it would need to legally withdraw from the Creation Agreement, as Georgia did previously. On 14 March 2014, a bill was introduced to Ukraine's parliament to denounce their ratification of the CIS Creation Agreement, but it was never approved. Following the 2014 parliamentary election, a new bill to denounce the CIS agreement was introduced. In September 2015, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed Ukraine will continue taking part in the CIS "on a selective basis". Since that month, Ukraine has had no representatives in the CIS Executive Committee building. In April 2018, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko indicated that Ukraine would formally leave the CIS. As of 1 June, the CIS secretariat had not received formal notice from Ukraine of its withdrawal from the CIS, a process that will take one year to complete, following notice being given.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: On 19 May 2018, President Poroshenko signed a decree formally ending Ukraine's participation in CIS statutory bodies. The CIS secretariat stated that it will continue inviting Ukraine to participate. Ukraine has further stated that it intends to review its participation in all CIS agreements and only continue in those that are in its interests.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: In light of Russia's support for the independence of occupied regions within Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine, as well as its violation of the Istanbul Agreement (see Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty), legislative initiatives to denounce the agreement on the creation of CIS were tabled in Moldova's parliament on 25 March 2014, though they were not approved. A similar bill was proposed in January 2018.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: On 14 June 2022, Moldovan Minister of Foreign Affairs Nicu Popescu said the Moldovan government was considering the prospect of leaving the CIS, although at the end of May President Maia Sandu had said the country would not leave for the time being. An August 2021 poll conducted in Moldova (prior to the start of Russia's invasion of neighbouring Ukraine) found that 48.1% of respondents supported Moldova's withdrawal from the CIS. On 30 November 2022, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Moldova Nicu Popescu stated that Moldova will suspend its participation in CIS meetings.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: The Interparliamentary Assembly was established on 27 March 1992 in Kazakhstan. On 26 May 1995 CIS leaders signed the Convention on the Interparliamentary Assembly of Member Nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States eventually ratified by nine parliaments. Under the terms of the convention, the IPA was invested with international legitimacy and is housed in the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg and acts as the consultative parliamentary wing of the CIS created to discuss problems of parliamentary cooperation and reviews draft documents of common interest and passes model laws to the national legislatures in the CIS (as well as recommendations) for their use in the preparation of new laws and amendments to existing legislation too which have been adopted by more than 130 documents that ensure the convergence of laws in the CIS to the national legislation. The Assembly is actively involved in the development of integration processes in the CIS and also sends observers to the national elections. The Assembly held its 32nd Plenary meeting in Saint Petersburg on 14 May 2009.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: Since its inception, one of the primary goals of the CIS has been to provide a forum for discussing issues related to the social and economic development of the newly independent states. To achieve this goal member states have agreed to promote and protect human rights. Initially, efforts to achieve this goal consisted merely of statements of goodwill, but on 26 May 1995, the CIS adopted a Commonwealth of Independent States Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: In 1991, four years before the 1995 human rights treaty, article 33 of the Charter of the CIS created a Human Rights Commission with its seat in Minsk, Belarus. This was confirmed by the decision of the Council of Heads of States of the CIS in 1993. In 1995, the CIS adopted a human rights treaty that includes civil and political as well as social and economic human rights. This treaty entered into force in 1998. The CIS treaty is modelled on the European Convention on Human Rights, but lacking the strong implementation mechanisms of the latter. In the CIS treaty, the Human Rights Commission has very vaguely defined authority. The Statute of the Human Rights Commission, however, also adopted by the CIS Member States as a decision, gives the commission the right to receive inter-state as well as individual communications.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: CIS members, especially in Central Asia, continue to have among the world's poorest human rights records. Many activists point to examples such as the 2005 Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan to show that there has been almost no improvement in human rights since the collapse of the Soviet Union in Central Asia. The consolidation of power by President Vladimir Putin has resulted in a steady decline in the modest progress of previous years in Russia. In turn, this has led to little to no scrutiny by Russia when it comes to the situation of human rights in other CIS member states. The Commonwealth of Independent States continues to face serious challenges in meeting even basic international standards.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: The CIS Charter establishes the Council of Ministers of Defence, which is vested with the task of coordinating military cooperation of the CIS member states. To this end, the Council develops conceptual approaches to the questions of military and defence policy of the CIS member states; develops proposals aimed to prevent armed conflicts on the territory of the member states or with their participation; gives expert opinions on draft treaties and agreements related to the questions of defence and military developments; issues related suggestions and proposals to the attention of the CIS Council of the Heads of State. Also important is the council's work on the approximation of the legal acts in the area of defence and military development.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: An important manifestation of integration processes in the area of military and defense collaboration of the CIS member states is the creation, in 1995, of the joint CIS Air Defense System. Over the years, the military personnel of the joint CIS Air Defense System grew twofold along the western, European border of the CIS, and by 1.5 times on its southern borders.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: When Boris Yeltsin became Russian Defence Minister on 7 May 1992, Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, was appointed as Commander-in-Chief of the CIS Armed Forces (), and his staff were ejected from the MOD and General Staff buildings and given offices in the former Warsaw Pact Headquarters at 41 Leningradsky Prospekt on the northern outskirts of Moscow. Shaposhnikov resigned in June 1993.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: In December 1993, the CIS Armed Forces Headquarters was abolished. Instead, "the CIS Council of Defence Ministers created a CIS Military Cooperation Coordination Headquarters (MCCH) in Moscow, with 50 percent of the funding provided by Russia." General Viktor Samsonov was appointed as Chief of Staff. The headquarters has now moved to 101000, Москва, Сверчков переулок, 3/2, and 41 Leningradsky Prospekt has now been taken over by another Russian MOD agency.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: In 2010, the chiefs of the CIS general staffs spoke in favour of integrating their national armed forces.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: In 1994, negotiations were initiated between the CIS countries on establishing a free trade area (FTA), but no agreement was signed. A proposed free trade agreement would have covered all twelve then CIS members and treaty parties except Turkmenistan.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: In 2009, a new agreement was begun to create a FTA, the CIS Free Trade Agreement (CISFTA). In October 2011, the new free trade agreement was signed by eight of the eleven CIS prime ministers; Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Ukraine at a meeting in St. Petersburg. Initially, the treaty was only ratified by Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, however by the end of 2012, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Moldova had also completed ratification. In December 2013, Uzbekistan, signed and then ratified the treaty, while the remaining two signatories, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan later both ratified the treaty in January 2014 and December 2015 respectively. Azerbaijan is the only full CIS member state not to participate in the free trade area.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: The free trade agreement eliminates export and import duties on several goods but also contains a number of exemptions that will ultimately be phased out. An agreement was also signed on the basic principles of currency regulation and currency controls in the CIS at the same October 2011 meeting.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed that CIS members take up a digitization agenda to modernize CIS economies.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: After a discussion about the creation of a common economic space between the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, agreement in principle about the creation of this space was announced after a meeting in the Moscow suburb of Novo-Ogarevo on 23 February 2003. The Common Economic Space would involve a supranational commission on trade and tariffs that would be based in Kyiv, would initially be headed by a representative of Kazakhstan, and would not be subordinate to the governments of the four nations. The ultimate goal would be a regional organization that would be open for other countries to join as well, and could eventually lead even to a single currency.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: On 22 May 2003, the "Verkhovna Rada" (the Ukrainian Parliament) voted 266 votes in favour and 51 against the joint economic space. However, most believe that Viktor Yushchenko's victory in the Ukrainian presidential election of 2004 was a significant blow against the project: Yushchenko had shown renewed interest in Ukrainian membership in the European Union and such membership would be incompatible with the envisioned common economic space. Yushchenko's successor Viktor Yanukovych stated on 27 April 2010 "Ukraine's entry into the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan is not possible today, since the economic principles and the laws of the WTO do not allow it, we develop our policy following WTO principles". Ukraine has been a WTO member since 2008.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: A Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia was thus created in 2010, A single market had been envisioned for 2012, but instead the customs union was renamed as the Eurasian Customs Union and expanded to include Armenia and Kyrgyzstan in 2015.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan formed the OCAC in 1991 as Central Asian Commonwealth (CAC). The organisation continued in 1994 as the Central Asian Economic Union (CAEU), in which Tajikistan and Turkmenistan did not participate. In 1998 it became the Central Asian Economic Cooperation (CAEC), which marked the return of Tajikistan. On 28 February 2002, it was renamed to its current name. Russia joined on 28 May 2004. On 7 October 2005, it was decided between the member states that Uzbekistan will join the Eurasian Economic Community and that the organisations will merge. The organisations joined on 25 January 2006. It is not clear what will happen to the status of current CACO observers that are not observers to EurAsEC (Georgia and Turkey).


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: The post-Soviet disputed states of Abkhazia, Artsakh, South Ossetia, and Transnistria are all members of the Community for Democracy and Rights of Nations which aims to forge closer integration among the members.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: The CIS-Election Monitoring Organisation () is an election monitoring body that was formed in October 2002, following a Commonwealth of Independent States heads of states meeting which adopted the "Convention on the Standards of Democratic Elections, Electoral Rights, and Freedoms in the Member States of the Commonwealth of Independent States". The CIS-EMO has been sending election observers to member countries of the CIS since this time.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: The election monitoring body has approved many elections which have been heavily criticised by independent observers.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: Russia has urged that the Russian language receive official status in all of the CIS member states. So far Russian is an official language in only four states: Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. Russian is also considered an official language in the region of Transnistria and the autonomous region of Gagauzia in Moldova. Viktor Yanukovych, the Moscow-supported presidential candidate in the controversial 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, declared his intention to make Russian an official second language of Ukraine. However, the Western-supported candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who eventually won, successfully opposed the idea. After his early 2010 election, President Yanukovych stated (on 9 March 2010), "Ukraine will continue to promote the Ukrainian language as its only state language."


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: At the time of the Soviet Union's dissolution in December 1991, had been invited to or qualified for various 1992 sports events. A joint CIS team took its place in some of these. The "Unified Team" competed in the 1992 Winter Olympics and 1992 Summer Olympics, and a CIS association football team competed in UEFA Euro 1992. A CIS bandy team played some friendlies in January 1992 and made its last appearance at the 1992 Russian Government Cup, where it also played against the new Russia national bandy team. The Soviet Union bandy championship for 1991–1992 was rebranded as a CIS championship.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: In 2017, a festival for national sports and games, known as the Festival of National Sports and Games of the Commonwealth of Independent States () was held in Ulyanovsk. The main sports were sambo, tug of war, mas-wrestling, gorodki, belt wrestling, lapta, bandy (rink), kettlebell lifting, chess and archery. A few demonstration sports were also a part of the programme.


title: Commonwealth of Independent States

text: The CIS has also been a relevant forum to support cultural relations between former Soviet republics. In 2006, the Council of the Heads of Governments of the CIS launched the Intergovernmental Foundation for Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Cooperation (IFESCCO). IFESSCO has substantially relied on Russia's financial support since its creation and supported several multilateral cultural events, including the ‘CIS Capital of Culture’ initiative. In 2017, the Armenian city of Goris was declared the CIS Cultural Capital of the year.


title: Catch Me If You Can

text: Catch Me If You Can is a 2002 American biographical crime comedy-drama film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks with Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen, Nathalie Baye, Amy Adams and James Brolin in supporting roles. The screenplay by Jeff Nathanson is based on the "autobiography" of Frank Abagnale, who claims that before his 19th birthday, he successfully performed cons worth millions of dollars by posing as a Pan American World Airways pilot, a Georgia doctor, and a Louisiana parish prosecutor. The truth of his story is questionable.


title: Catch Me If You Can

text: A movie version of Abagnale's book of the same name was contemplated soon after it was published in 1980 but began in earnest in 1997 when Spielberg's DreamWorks bought the film rights. David Fincher, Gore Verbinski, Lasse Hallström, Miloš Forman, and Cameron Crowe were all considered to direct the film before Spielberg decided to direct it himself. Filming took place from February to May 2002.


title: Catch Me If You Can

text: The film opened on December 25, 2002, to critical and commercial success. At the 75th Academy Awards, Christopher Walken and John Williams were nominated for Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Score, respectively.


title: Catch Me If You Can

text: In 1963, Frank William Abagnale Jr. lives in New Rochelle, New York with his father Frank Abagnale Sr. and his French mother Paula. During his youth, he witnesses his father's many techniques for conning people. Because of Frank Sr.'s tax problems with the Internal Revenue Service, the family is forced to move from their large home to a small apartment.


title: Catch Me If You Can

text: One day, Frank discovers that his mother is having an affair with his father's friend Jack Barnes at the Rotary Club of New Rochelle. When his parents divorce, Frank runs away. Needing money, he turns to confidence scams to survive, and his cons grow bolder. He impersonates a Pan Am pilot and forges the airline's payroll checks. Soon, his forgeries are worth millions of dollars.


title: Catch Me If You Can

text: News of the crimes reaches the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Agent Carl Hanratty begins tracking Frank. Carl finds him at a hotel, but Frank tricks Carl into believing he is a Secret Service agent named Barry Allen. He escapes before Carl realizes that he was fooled.


title: Catch Me If You Can

text: Frank begins to impersonate a doctor. As Dr. Frank Conners, he falls in love with Brenda, a naive young hospital worker. He asks her attorney father for her hand in marriage and also for help with arranging to take the Louisiana State Bar exam, which Frank passes. Carl tracks Frank to his and Brenda's engagement party, but Frank escapes through a bedroom window, telling Brenda to meet him at Miami International Airport two days later.


title: Catch Me If You Can

text: At the airport, Frank spots Brenda, but also plainclothes agents. He realizes she has given him up, then drives away. Re-assuming his pilot identity, he stages a false recruiting drive for stewardesses at a local college. Surrounded by eight women as stewardesses, he conceals himself from Carl and the other agents at the airport and escapes on a flight to Madrid, Spain.


title: Catch Me If You Can

text: In 1967, Carl tracks down Frank in his mother's hometown of Montrichard, France. He is incarcerated in a French prison in Marseille, where he becomes very ill due to its poor conditions. Carl takes Frank on a flight back to the United States. As they approach, the FBI agent informs him that his father has died. Grief-stricken, Frank escapes from the plane and reaches the house of his mother, who is now married to Barnes and has a daughter. Frank surrenders to Carl and is sentenced to 12 years in a maximum-security prison.


title: Catch Me If You Can

text: Carl occasionally visits Frank. During one visit, he shows him a fraud check from a case he is working on. Frank immediately figures out that the bank teller was involved in the fraud. Impressed, Carl convinces the FBI to allow him to serve the remainder of his sentence working for the FBI Financial Crimes Unit. Frank agrees but soon grows restless about the tedious office work.