With steep walls and deep valleys, the Grand Canyon in the western United States or the massive gorges that saw through the margins of the Tibetan Plateau are some of the most awesome and spectacular landforms on the planet. But have you ever wondered how they are formed? Some studies have proposed that canyons form when a mountain range grows in height and a river running through it cuts into the rock formation like a knife, ultimately forming gorges. Other…
NASA is launching a prototype instrument that could make it easier to monitor volcanic activity and air quality. Perched aboard a CubeSat about 300 miles (480 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, the “Nanosat Atmospheric Chemistry Hyperspectral Observation System,” or NACHOS, will use a compact hyperspectral imager to locate sources of trace gases in areas as small as 0.15 square miles (0.4 square kilometers) – about the size of the Mall of America in Minnesota. NACHOS is part of Northrop Grumman’s 17th resupply mission to the…
University of Tübingen team finds parallels with Martian environment in investigation of Spain’s heavy-metal polluted Rio Tinto estuary. At the mouth of the Rio Tinto in southwestern Spain, acidic river water – polluted with heavy metals from ore mining and mineral weathering – mixes with the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean. Here, microorganisms that love such extreme conditions form a unique community. They live in water as acidic as vinegar, are resistant to high salinity, and some also cope…
Rock properties are hard to measure under extreme pressure. Scientists present a simple solution for a very challenging problem. Researchers led by Sergey Lobanov from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences have developed a new method to measure the density of silicon dioxide (SiO2) glass, one of the most important materials in industry and geology, at pressures of up to 110 gigapascals, 1.1 million times higher than normal atmospheric pressure. Instead of employing highly focused X-rays at a synchrotron…
ageAWI experts confirm the delayed spread of the ice sheet 35 million years ago. Roughly 35 million years ago, Earth cooled rapidly. At roughly the same time, the Drake Passage formed between South America and the Antarctic, paving the way for the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Thanks to these two factors, Antarctica was soon completely covered in ice. As a study from the Alfred Wegener Institute now shows, this massive glaciation was delayed in at least one region. This new piece…
Chilly seawater may slow ice loss on the island until 2050, then warming and melting may accelerate. A region of cooling water in the North Atlantic Ocean near Iceland, nicknamed the “Blue Blob,” has likely slowed the melting of the island’s glaciers since 2011 and may continue to stymie ice loss until about 2050, according to new research. The origin and cause of the Blue Blob, which is located south of Iceland and Greenland, is still being investigated. The cold…
Using latest advances in computer modelling, an international team of researchers has shed new light on the properties and behavior of magma found several hundreds of kilometers deep within the Earth. Unlike the classic Jules Verne science fiction novel Journey to the Center of the Earth or movie The Core, humans cannot venture into the Earth’s interior beyond a few kilometres of its surface. But thanks to latest advances in computer modelling, an international team of researchers led by the…
Researchers uncover why a complex earthquake in the south Atlantic sent an unexpected tsunami around the world in 2021. Highlights A 47 km-deep, magnitude 7.5 earthquake that struck the south Atlantic in 2021 and caused a global tsunami was actually a sequence of five earthquakes. A shallow, “almost invisible” magnitude 8.2 quake accounted for 70% of the energy released during the event. Global earthquake monitoring needs to improve to understand and mitigate such complex earthquakes and their associated hazards. Scientists…
AWI study provides the basis for reliable projections of the impacts of climate change in the Antarctic. Despite global warming and the sea-ice loss in the Arctic, the Antarctic sea-ice extent has remained largely unchanged since 1979. However, existing climate model-based simulations indicate significant sea-ice loss, contrary to actual observations. As experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute have now shown, the ocean may weaken warming around Antarctica and delay sea-ice retreat. Given that many models are not capable of accurately…
Insufficiently considered carbon stocks in very old sediments are released as greenhouse gases / publication in ‘Frontiers in Earth Science’. Thawing permafrost in the Arctic could be emitting greenhouse gases from previously unaccounted-for carbon stocks, fuelling global warming. That is the result of a study conducted by a team of geologists led by Professor Dr Janet Rethemeyer at the University of Cologne’s Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, together with colleagues from the University of Hamburg and the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam…
It’s the front line of climate change and could hold the key to predicting global sea level rise, but what goes on at the underwater face of Greenland’s glaciers is a mystery to science. That could change in 2023 with a bold new mission led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin that will explore three of Greenland’s glaciers with a submersible robot. The voyage will be the first time Greenland’s glaciers — which make up the world’s…
Scientists repeatedly check the weather forecasts as they prepare aircraft for flight and perform last-minute checks on science instruments. There’s a large winter storm rolling in, but that’s exactly what these storm-chasing scientists are hoping for. The team is tracking storms across the Midwest and Eastern United States in two NASA planes equipped with scientific instruments to help understand the inner workings of winter storms as they form and develop. The team is flying two aircraft to investigate winter storms,…
Polarstern expedition explores the Earth’s history of Antarctica; the expedition launches the new Polarstern app. On 6 January, the research vessel Polarstern set off from Cape Town in South Africa for an expedition of around eight weeks to the Antarctic. Extensive preventive measures allow the Alfred Wegener Institute to tackle the important research on former instabilities of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet despite the Corona pandemic, which will be continued on two further planned expeditions in the coming years. Interested…
For the first time, the Amazon basin could be identified as dominant source region for water precipitating in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. From the rainforest, elevated water vapour travels more than 2000 km westwards, crosses the Andes, and turns southeast over the Pacific to form precipitation over the Atacama Desert. Dr Christoph Böhm from the University of Cologne’s Institute of Geophysics and Meteorology has identified moisture conveyor belts (MCBs) as the main mechanism for precipitation. They account for…
The Matterhorn appears as an immovable, massive mountain that has towered over the landscape near Zermatt for thousands of years. A study just published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2021.117295) now shows that this impression is wrong. An international research team has proven that the Matterhorn is instead constantly in motion, swaying gently back and forth about once every two seconds. This subtle vibration with normally imperceptible amplitudes is stimulated by seismic energy in the Earth originating from…
Glacial erosion likely caused atmospheric oxygen levels to dip over past 800,000 years. An unknown culprit has been removing oxygen from our atmosphere for at least 800,000 years, and an analysis of air bubbles preserved in Antarctic ice for up to 1.5 million years has revealed the likely suspect. “We know atmospheric oxygen levels began declining slightly in the late Pleistocene, and it looks like glaciers might have something to do with that,” said Rice University’s Yuzhen Yan, corresponding author…
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