Human induced climate change, rather than naturally occurring ocean cycles, may be responsible for the recent increases in frequency and strength of North Atlantic hurricanes, according to Penn State and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers.
“Anthropogenic factors are likely responsible for long-term trends in tropical Atlantic warmth and tropical cyclone activity,” the researchers report in an upcoming issue of the American Geophysical Society’s EOS.
Michael
Different disasters require different responses and, in turn, multiple technological solutions, which is a costly duplication of resources. REMSAT II, a project supported by ESA’s Telecommunications Department, has, however, successfully extended its forest fire fighting capabilities to the domain of flood relief, saving both resources and lives.
Already demonstrated to be a big success in aiding Canadian fire-fighters during 2004 (Related news: Using satellites in the fight against fores
Scientists don’t know if global warming is responsible
Atmospheric temperature measurements by U.S. weather satellites indicate Earth’s hot, tropical zone has expanded farther from the equator since 1979, says a study by scientists from the University of Utah and University of Washington.
Researchers say the apparent north-south widening of the tropics amounts to 2 degrees of latitude or 140 miles. But they do not know yet if the tropical expansion was triggered by
Minerals crunched by intense pressure near the Earth’s core lose much of their ability to conduct infrared light, according to a new study from the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory. Since infrared light contributes to the flow of heat, the result challenges some long-held notions about heat transfer in the lower mantle, the layer of molten rock that surrounds the Earth’s solid core. The work could aid the study of mantle plumes–large columns of hot upwelling magma belie
An international team of scientists has presented its findings from the first observations of the eruption of a submarine volcano that in 2004 and 2005 spewed out plumes of sulfur-rich fluid and pulses of volcanic ash 550 meters below the ocean’s surface near the Mariana Islands northwest of Guam.
Those findings will be published Thursday in Nature – just after many of those same scientists returned from another expedition to the site, where they observed new bursts of erupting
Using NASA’s advanced Earth-observing satellites, scientists have discovered a new opportunity to build early detection systems that might protect thousands from floods and landslides.
This potential breakthrough in disaster monitoring and warning links satellite observations of soil type, vegetation and land slope with observations of rainfall, rivers and topography.
“Flood and landslides are the most widespread natural hazards on Earth, responsible for thousands
If Earth’s past cycles of warming and cooling are any indication, temperatures by the end of the century will be even hotter than current climate models predict, according to a report by University of California, Berkeley, researchers.
The scientists based their conclusion on a study of Antarctic ice cores containing a 360,000-year record of global temperature and levels of carbon dioxide and methane – two of the major greenhouse gases implicated in global warming. They f
ESA has announced the shortlist of new Earth Explorer mission proposals within its Living Planet Programme. This is part of the selection procedure that will eventually lead to the launch of the fourth Earth Explorer Core mission during the first half of the next decade.
The six missions cover a range of environmental issues with the aim of furthering our understanding of the Earth system and changing climate: BIOMASS – to take global measurements of forest biomass.
Work in an MIT lab may help energy companies withdraw millions of additional barrels of oil from beneath the sea floor. Typically, companies recover only 30 percent to 40 percent of the oil in a given reservoir. Since a single reservoir may contain a billion barrels total, increasing that “recovery efficiency” by even a single percentage point would mean a lot of additional oil. Toward that end, Assistant Professor David Mohrig of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences
When sea ice freezes, its salt separates out, and heavy salty water sinks to the bottom. However, it turns out that this process take place more slowly than we thought, which may have implications for our climate models.
Lars Henrik Smedsrud of the Bjerknes Centre at the University of Bergen and Ragnheid Skogseth of the University Course on Svalbard have been studying what happens when new ice and brash ice form at sea – a subject which they have been remarkably alone in study
A team of European scientists reports that climate change estimates for the next century may have substantially underestimated the potential magnitude of global warming. They say that actual warming due to human fossil fuel emissions may be 15-to-78 percent higher than warming estimates that do not take into account the feedback mechanism involving carbon dioxide and Earth’s temperature.
In a paper to be published on 26 May in Geophysical Research Letters, Marten Scheffer of Wagening
145 million years ago Scandinavia was hit by a tsunami, probably more intense than the one that hit Southeastern Asia in December 2004. Traces of this ancient tsunami are still left and these have been discovered by the geologists Vivi Vajda and Jane Wigforss-Lange at Lund University. The scientific results will soon be published in the journal Progress in Natural Science.
The site is located at Eriksdal, in the southernmost province of Sweden, Skåne. Scandinavia and the Baltic formed
If Earth’s past cycles of warming and cooling are any indication, temperatures by the end of the century will be even hotter than current climate models predict, according to a report by researchers in Berkeley, California. The scientists studied Antarctic ice cores containing a 360,000-year record of global temperature and levels of carbon dioxide and methane–two of the major greenhouse gases implicated in global warming. They found that during periods of warming, greenhouse
A team of European scientists reports that climate change estimates for the next century may have substantially underestimated the potential magnitude of global warming. They say that actual warming due to human fossil fuel emissions may be 15-to-78 percent higher than warming estimates that do not take into account the feedback mechanism involving carbon dioxide and Earth’s temperature. In a paper to be published on 26 May in Geophysical Research Letters, Marten Scheffer of Wageningen
ESA’s Cluster satellites have flown through regions of the Earth’s magnetic field that accelerate electrons to approximately one hundredth the speed of light. The observations present Cluster scientists with their first detection of these events and give them a look at the details of a universal process known as magnetic reconnection.
On 25 January 2005, the four Cluster spacecraft found themselves in the right place at the right time: a region of space known as an electron diffu
Using time series analyses of a 22-year record of satellite observations across the northern circumpolar high latitudes, scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center are assessing trends in vegetation photosynthetic activity. The results indicate that tundra areas consistently and predominantly show greening trends while forested areas show browning, indicating that the boreal forest biome might be responding to climate change in previously unexpected ways. This research is highlighted in the
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