Cole Sercer, of Sercer Machine & Fabrication, stands beside the Big Peanut that he and his employees designed and built near Interstate 75 in Ashburn, Ga., Thursday, July 20, 2023. The monument replaces a similar peanut that blew down during Hurricane Michael in October 2018. 

ASHBURN, Ga. — Georgia’s Big Peanut is back.

The roadside landmark along Interstate 75 in south Georgia was rededicated Thursday, July 20, nearly five years after an earlier version was felled by the winds of Hurricane Michael.

This time, the giant goober is made of sheet metal, not fiberglass.

It’s a symbol of pride in the heart of south Georgia’s peanut belt, as well as an enticement for tourists to pull off the highway in the small town of Ashburn.

The Ashburn-Turner County Chamber of Commerce raised nearly $80,000 to replace the giant groundnut, which had saluted motorists since 1975 until it was blown down on Oct. 10, 2018. The majority of the money came from the Georgia Department of Agriculture, although Turner County residents also raised thousands.

The peanut, atop a brick pedestal, has come to symbolize the county of 9,000 people, which is halfway between Macon and the Florida state line.

“I think it represents home,” said Ashley Miller, the chamber’s executive director. “I know it’s a small town, but when you say, ‘Have you seen the peanut?’ That’s me.”

She said it’s also a fitting tribute to peanut farmers in a county where almost everyone is touched by agriculture.

Community leaders spent about $70,000 to replace the peanut, holding the remaining money for maintenance. They hired Cole Sercer, of Sercer Machine & Fabrication in nearby Rebecca, to make the new peanut.

Sercer said he and employees modeled the new nut after the remains of the one destroyed by the hurricane. But it’s made differently, with a metal pole and frame inside and dozens of custom-worked sheet metal panels forming the curvy shell of the nut. Below is a golden crown with an aluminum frame and yellow plastic panels. The peanut is painted in brown and beige architectural paint, and in a modern touch, is now illuminated by LED lights at night.

It took workers a combined 700 to 800 hours to build the landmark, Sercer said, which weighs around 5,000 pounds. From the bottom of the brick pylon to the top of the peanut, Sercer said the landmark is more than 40 feet tall.

Sercer said his company does “a little bit of everything” including customizing trucks and off-road vehicles, but it also works on farm equipment and in peanut-processing plants.

Next up is making the Big Peanut more welcoming in the social media age. Miller said Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis once took a selfie with the previous giant goober, and she plans to set up a “selfie spot” so tourists can get the best angle with the new Big Peanut.

Arizona teen Alicia Navarro missing for nearly 4 years shows up safe at Montana police station

GLENDALE, Ariz. — An Arizona teenager who disappeared nearly four years ago is safe after walking into a police station in Montana, authorities said.

Alicia Navarro, 18, of Glendale, showed up alone this week in a small town about 40 miles from the Canadian border and identified herself, police in Glendale, a Phoenix suburb, said Wednesday, July 26.

Her disappearance sparked a massive search that included the FBI. Santiago said over the years, police had received thousands of tips.

Her mother, Jessica Nunez, raised concerns that Navarro, who was diagnosed as high-functioning on the autism spectrum, may have been lured away by someone she met online.

The name of the town wasn’t immediately disclosed, but Montana is more than 1,000 miles from Arizona.

“She is by all accounts safe, she is by all accounts healthy, and she is by all accounts happy,” police spokesman Jose Santiago said at a news conference.

Investigators were trying to determine what happened to Navarro after her disappearance at age 14 on Sept. 15, 2019.

Ocean currents vital for distributing heat could collapse by midcentury, study says

WASHINGTON — A system of ocean currents that transports heat northward across the North Atlantic could collapse by mid-century, according to a new study, and scientists have said before that such a collapse could cause catastrophic sea-level rise and extreme weather across the globe.

In recent decades, researchers have both raised and downplayed the specter of Atlantic current collapse. It even prompted a movie that strayed far from the science. Two years ago the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said any such catastrophe is unlikely this century. But the new study published in Nature Communications suggests it might not be as far away and unlikely as mainstream science says.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is a vital system of ocean currents that circulates water throughout the Atlantic Ocean, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s a lengthy process, taking an estimated 1,000 years to complete, but has slowed even more since the mid-1900s.

A further slowdown or complete halting of the circulation could create more extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere, sea-level rise on the East Coast of the United States and drought for millions in southern Africa, scientists in Germany and the U.S. have said. But the timing is uncertain.

In the new study, Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen, two researchers from Denmark, analyzed sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic between 1870 and 2020 as a proxy, meaning a way of assessing, this circulation. They found the system could collapse as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095, given current global greenhouse gas emissions. This diverges from the prediction made by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change in 2021, which said the collapse isn’t likely to occur this century.

“There are large uncertainties in this study, in many prior studies, and in climate impact assessment overall, and scientists sometimes miss important aspects that can lead to both over and underprediction of impacts,” Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, a carbon management company, said in a statement. “Still, the conclusion is obvious: Action must be swift and profound to counter major climate risks.”

Stefan Rahmstorf, co-author on a 2018 study on the subject, published an extensive analysis of the Ditlevesen’s study on RealClimate, a website that publishes commentary from climate scientists. While he said that a tipping point for the collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is “highly uncertain,” he also called the IPCC estimate conservative.

“Increasingly the evidence points to the risk being far greater than 10% during this century,” he wrote, “…rather worrying for the next few decades.”