For many, sea-level rise is a remote and distant threat faced by people like the residents of the Tuvalu Islands in the South Pacific, where the highest point of land is only 5 meters (15 feet) above sea level and tidal floods occasionally cover their crops in seawater.
Now, however, a recently published study by researchers from The Earth Institute at Columbia University and the International Institute for Environment and Development suggests that as much as 10 percent of the
Scientists at NASA are finding that with hurricanes, they can look at the cloud tops for clues about the behavior of winds below the hurricane on the Earth’s surface.
By looking at how high up the rain is forming within clouds, scientists can estimate whether the hurricane’s surface winds will strengthen or weaken. They have found that if rain is falling from clouds that extend up to 9 miles high, and that rain continues for at least one out of three hours, a hurricane&
The mountains skipped like rams…
– Psalm 114
“Moving mountains” has come to mean doing the impossible. Yet at least once in the past, one mountain relocated a fair distance away. This feat took place around 50 million years ago, in the area of the present-day border between Montana and Wyoming. Heart Mountain was part of a larger mountain range when the 100 km (62 mile) long ridge somehow became detached from its position and shifted about 100 km to the southwest. This “
Halfway to the center of the Earth, at the boundary between the core and the mantle, lies a massive folded slab of rock that once formed the ocean floor and sank beneath North America some 50 million years ago. A team of seismologists led by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, detected the slab by analyzing seismic waves reflected from the deepest layer of the mantle beneath an area off the west coast of Central America.
“If you imagine cold honey pouring onto a plat
Fabled equatorial icecaps will disappear within two decades because of global warming, a study led by UCL (University College London) has found.
Reporting online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the first survey in a decade of glaciers in the Rwenzori Mountains, East Africa, has found that an increase in air temperature over the last four decades has contributed to a substantial reduction in glacial cover.
The Rwenzori Mountains – also known as the ’Mou
In the run up to the launch of the European MetOp-A satellite – scheduled for 17 July 2006 from Baikonur, Kazakhstan – the European scientific community has gathered at ESRIN, ESA’s Earth observation centre in Frascati, Italy, for the first EUMETSAT Polar System/MetOp Research Announcement of Opportunity workshop.
MetOp-A, developed by ESA in collaboration with the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), will be Europe’s first polar-orbi
Researchers of the Institute of Ecological Problems of the North, Ural Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Schmidt Institute of Physics of Earth, Russian Academy of Sciences, have developed technology that allows to register nanoearthquakes – seismic events of minimal possible magnitudes (-4, -5). Registration of such events allows to quickly and accurately make up seismic activity maps of small-scale territories.
Investigation of seismic activity in quiet areas (including rev
ETH researchers discovered a very unusual mechanism of plastic deformation in the Earth’s mantle. Furthermore, they have predicted a new family of mantle minerals. These discoveries shed new light on the plastic flow of mantle rocks inside our planet – the process that controls plate tectonics and the associated earthquakes, volcanism, and continental drift.
Plastic flow in the Earth’s mantle is the microscopic process behind plate tectonics and the associated continental drift,
Scientists at The University of Manchester have uncovered the first evidence of seawater deep inside the Earth shedding new light on the fate of the planet’s oceans, according to research published in Nature (May 11, 2006).
For years geologists have debated whether seawater is subducted (absorbed) into the deep Earth or whether there is a ‘subduction barrier’ blocking its absorption.
For the first time scientists at The University of Manchester have positively identified
NASA and university researchers have found that thunderstorms over Tibet provide a main pathway for water vapor and chemicals to travel from the lower atmosphere, where human activity directly affects atmospheric composition, into the stratosphere, where the protective ozone layer resides.
Learning how water vapor reaches the stratosphere can help improve climate prediction models. Similarly, understanding the pathways that ozone-depleting chemicals can take to reach the stratosph
Michael Schlesinger, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will participate in news conferences in New York City on May 9, and Washington, D.C., on May 10, publicizing the U.S. debut of the book “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change.”
Published by Cambridge University Press, the book builds upon scientific findings presented at the “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change” conference held in Exeter, England, in February last year. The conf
Sri Lanka’s coastal drinking water supply continues to suffer the effects of the December 2004 tsunami, which caused major death and destruction in the region. Much of the island nation’s coastal area relies on wells, usually hand dug and relatively shallow. Some 40,000 such wells, each typically serving several families, were destroyed or contaminated by the tsunami. The continued sustainability of the aquifers that supply such wells is in doubt, due to continued saltwater contaminat
The narrow search for water may miss important clues, say USC geobiologists
The great search for extraterrestrial life has focused on water at the expense of a crucial element, say geobiologists at the University of Southern California.
Writing in the Perspectives section of the May 5 issue of Science, four USC researchers propose searching for organic nitrogen as a direct indicator of the presence of life. Nitrogen is essential to the chemistry of living organisms.
The vast loop of winds that drives climate and ocean behavior across the tropical Pacific has weakened by 3.5% since the mid-1800s, and it may weaken another 10% by 2100, according to a study led by University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) scientist Gabriel Vecchi. The study indicates that the only plausible explanation for the slowdown is human-induced climate change. The findings appear in the May 4 issue of Nature.
The Walker circulation, which spans almost half the cir
For many people, a monsoon brings to mind images of intense rainfall and high winds in faraway places. Actually, monsoons occur all over the globe, including North America. These seasonal reversals of winds trigger dramatic changes in rainfall and other weather events within a short period of time.
The North American monsoon affects large areas of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. This rainy season brings with it much more than torrential downpours from J
Separated in history by 100 years, the seafaring Minoans of Crete and the mercantile Canaanites of northern Egypt and the Levant (a large area of the Middle East) at the eastern end of the Mediterranean were never considered trading partners at the start of the Late Bronze Age. Until now.
Cultural links between the Aegean and Near Eastern civilizations will have to be reconsidered: A new Cornell University radiocarbon study of tree rings and seeds shows that the Santorini (or
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