While analyzing some of the world’s oldest coloured gemstones, researchers from the University of Waterloo discovered carbon residue that was once ancient life, encased in a 2.5 billion-year-old ruby. The research team, led by Chris Yakymchuk, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Waterloo, set out to study the geology of rubies to better understand the conditions necessary for ruby formation. During this research in Greenland, which contains the oldest known deposits of rubies in the world, the team found…
Multidisciplinary team of materials physicists and geophysicists combine theoretical predictions, simulations, and seismic tomography to find spin transition in the Earth’s mantle. The interior of the Earth is a mystery, especially at greater depths (> 660 km). Researchers only have seismic tomographic images of this region and, to interpret them, they need to calculate seismic (acoustic) velocities in minerals at high pressures and temperatures. With those calculations, they can create 3D velocity maps and figure out the mineralogy and temperature…
Since the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February, the rover and its team of scientists back on Earth have been hard at work exploring the floor of the crater that once held an ancient lake. Perseverance and the Mars 2020 mission are looking for signs of ancient life on Mars and preparing a returnable cache of samples for later analyses on Earth. Katie Stack Morgan is the Mars 2020 Deputy Project Scientist and a research scientist…
Researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) and Leipzig University are currently using a tethered balloon to study the air layers near the ground in the Arctic, which play a major role in climate change in this region. The measurements should help to better understand the particularly strong warming of the Arctic and to map it more precisely in climate models. After the balloon system already proved itself in the summer on the international MOSAiC expedition, it is…
Studies of the asteroid Vesta provide new findings on the formation of Earth-like planets The largest asteroid in our Solar System – Vesta – was exposed to an extensive series of impacts by large rocky bodies much earlier than previously assumed. Researchers of an international collaboration, including earth scientists of Heidelberg University and Freie Universität Berlin, reached this conclusion based on analyses of Vesta meteorites, numerical simulations, and observations carried out with the space probe Dawn in 2011 and 2012….
Study helps to better assess the capacity of global ecosystems to adapt to climate and environmental change. Ecosystems on Earth’s land surface support multiple functions and services that are critical for society, like biomass production, vegetation’s efficiency of using sunlight and water, water retention and climate regulation, and ultimately food security. Climate and environmental changes, as well as anthropogenic impacts, are continuously threatening the provision of these functions. To understand how terrestrial ecosystems will respond to this threat, it is…
Unlike the Antarctic ozone hole that develops annually during austral spring (September, October, and November), Arctic ozone levels usually stay well above the ozone hole threshold. The Arctic stratospheric vortex is typically too warm for polar stratospheric clouds to form, which are a key ingredient in severe ozone depletion processes. Much stronger planetary wave activity occurs in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere, which generates stronger dynamical heating to warm the stratospheric Arctic vortex. Despite this, polar meteorologists…
Negative trend continues – Comparatively moderate shrinkage of ice extent in 2021. The sea ice extent in the Arctic Ocean reached its annual minimum of 4.81 million square kilometres on 12 September 2021. As such, the 2021 Arctic sea-ice minimum comes in at 12th place on the negative list for absolute values. Sea-ice extent in September is one of the strongest signs of climate change, experts pointed out in the recently published 6th Assessment Report of Working Group I of…
Lava samples have revealed a new truth about the geological make-up of the Earth’s crust and could have implications for volcanic eruption early warning systems, a University of Queensland-led study has found. UQ volcanologist Dr Teresa Ubide said it was previously understood that cooled lava from so-called ‘hot spot’ volcanoes was ‘pristine’ magma from the melting mantle, tens of kilometres under the Earth’s surface. “This isn’t quite the case – we’ve been misled, geologically deceived,” Dr Ubide said. “For decades, we have…
Geophysicists solve a key problem in physics and provide results that can be applied in such diverse areas as planetary research and 3-D printing / publication in ‘PNAS’. The prediction of the angle of repose for raised mounds of dry cohesive granular material is a long-standing problem in the natural sciences and in industry. Using numerical (particle-based) simulations, geophysicists Dr Eric Parteli (until 2020 at the University of Cologne, now at the University of Duisburg-Essen) and Filip Elekes (University of…
Seismic instruments generally have a built-in navigation-grade single-mode GPS receiver. During the operation of the station, while recording seismic data, the equipment also records the location of the station at regular intervals. Broadband seismic instruments generally record the locations of stations every hour (or every day), while short-period seismometers often record the locations of stations at shorter intervals (for example, every ten minutes). Although the positioning accuracy of these single-mode GPS receivers is not as good as that of geodetic…
Surviving corals from past underwater heatwaves may be more tolerant of rising ocean temperatures, providing hope for conservation and restoration of reefs. Some coral communities are becoming more heat tolerant as ocean temperatures rise, offering hope for corals in a changing climate. After a series of marine heatwaves hit the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) in the central Pacific Ocean, a new study finds the impact of heat stress on the coral communities lessened over time. While a 2002-2003 heatwave devastated coral…
Study with participation from Heidelberg shows that supervolcanoes remain dangerous long after erupting. Besides cosmic impacts, supervolcanic eruptions rank among the worst catastrophes in the Earth’s history, like that of the Toba volcano on Sumatra (Indonesia) approximately 75,000 years ago, which affected all of Southeast Asia and beyond. Eruptions of a similar magnitude are known worldwide only from Yellowstone (USA) and a few other volcanoes that were active within the current geological period of the Quaternary. Until now, scientists assumed…
Landslides are recurrent geological phenomena on Earth that cause heavy casualties and property losses annually. While teleseismic receiver functions have been widely used for crust-mantle structure analysis, they have rarely been employed for inverting shallow structures, mainly because of their lower sensitivity due to Earth’s attenuation of high-frequency waves. Now researchers have pioneered the use of the high-frequency receiver functions of local earthquakes to invert the Poisson’s ratios and shear-wave velocities of the Quaternary Xishancun landslide. Situated in the town…
The solar wind-magnetosphere coupling and its dynamic process are the basic driving factors for space weather. To understand its physical connotation, it is necessary to understand the processes of global scale responses, mass and energy transportation, and the coupling between different regions. However, relying on single-point or multi-point in-situ measurements is not enough for grasping the global effects caused by the solar wind disturbance, which is the key to understand how the Sun affects and controls the plasma and space…
Improving projections, predictions and protection in the face of expected sea level rise. A new assessment of flood risk in Venice indicates that the impact of higher emissions on relative sea level rise during this century will be critical in planning future defence infrastructure for Venice and other coastal cities, state the authors of a new special issue published in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences today. The special issue, with contributions lead by researchers from Università del Salento, ISMAR…
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