Data from ESA’s Huygens probe have been used to validate a new model of the evolution of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, showing that its methane supply may be locked away in a kind of methane-rich ice.
The presence of methane in Titan’s atmosphere is one of the major enigmas that the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission is trying to solve.
Titan was revealed last year to have spectacular landscapes apparently carved by liquids. The Cassini-Huygens mission als
The nation’s newest and most advanced research aircraft will participate in its first major mission March 1 through April 30, when it will study a severe type of atmospheric turbulence that forms near mountains and endangers airplanes. The $81.5 million HIAPER aircraft, owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), will fly over treacherous whirlwinds, known as rotors, as they form above California’s Sierra Nevada mountain rang
Since its launch in 2002, Envisat, the world’s largest and most sophisticated satellite ever built, has been providing scientists and operational users with invaluable data for global monitoring and forecasting – and the future looks even brighter.
“The Envisat mission has reached its full maturity with the services provided by the satellite now well established, and the scientific results based on its data being increasing published,” Envisat Mission Manager Henri Laur said. (For m
Scientists from NASA and Columbia University, New York, have used computer modeling to successfully reproduce an abrupt climate change that took place 8,200 years ago. At that time, the beginning of the current warm period, climate changes were caused by a massive flood of freshwater into the North Atlantic Ocean.
This work is the first to consistently recreate the event by computer modeling, and the first time that the model results have been confirmed by comparison to the climate rec
Mangroves, the backbone of the tropical ocean coastlines, are far more important to the global ocean’s biosphere than previously thought. And while the foul-smelling muddy forests may not have the scientific allure of tropical reefs or rain forests, a team of researchers has noted that the woody coastline- dwelling plants provide more than 10 percent of essential dissolved organic carbon that is supplied to the global ocean from land, according to a report published 21 February in Global Biogeo
New research into a missing link in climatology shows that the Earth was not overcome by a greenhouse period when dinosaurs dominated, but experienced rapid fluctuations in temperature and sea level change that resulted in a balance of the global carbon cycle. The study is being published in the March issue of Geology.
“Most people think the mid-Cretaceous period was a super-greenhouse,” says Darren Gröcke, assistant professor and Director of the Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry L
Research into how volcanoes erupt led by Durham University’s Earth Sciences Department is taking volcanologists a step closer to being able to predict when and on what scale volcanoes will erupt.
In the three-year EU Erupt Project, funded by almost half a million euros of EU Framework 5 funding, scientists from seven European universities are working on four volcanoes. They have developed new techniques to examine what happens underground before a volcano erupts and how magma dev
A University of Sussex-led team of scientists is ahead in the race to solve one of the biggest mysteries of our physical world: why the Universe contains the matter that we’re made of.
In a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters, the team has just announced the results of a ten-year project to make one of the most sensitive measurements ever of sub-atomic particles. Theories attempting to explain the creation of matter in the aftermath of the Big Bang now have to be tun
On Dec. 16, 1811, residents of New Madrid, Mo., were wrested from sleep by violent shaking and a deafening roar. A short time later, church bells hundreds of miles away in Boston began to ring. It was the first of three massive earthquakes that rocked the central United States between December 1811 and February 1812, even changing the course of the Mississippi River in their aftermath.
“A big earthquake in the same region as the 1811-1812 earthquakes would have devastating consequences
Researcher outlines coral’s future in an increasingly acidic ocean
The ocean is getting more and more acidic, and that’s bad news for coral reefs. That’s the word from University of Miami Rosenstiel School’s Dr. Christopher Langdon who will speak on “Possible Consequences of Increasing Atmospheric CO2 on Coral Reef Ecosystems,” Monday, Feb. 20 at 3 p.m. HST (8 p.m. EST) in Honolulu at the American Geophysical Union’s 2006 Ocean Sciences Meeting.
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Earth System Experts to Speak at IGBP Session on “Vital Organs in the Earth System: What is the Prognosis?” at AAAS Annual Meeting
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting, St. Louis 16-20 February 2006, America’s Center convention site.
SESSION TITLE: Vital Organs in the Earth System: What is the Prognosis?
SESSION DATE: 2/19/2006, 8:30 AM to 11:30 AM
LOCATION: Renaissance Grand Hotel (opposite main conference ve
Study Suggests Climate Models Underestimate Future Warming
Scientists have found evidence that tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures may have once reached 107°F (42°C)—about 25°F (14°C) higher than ocean temperatures today and warmer than a hot tub. The surprisingly high ocean temperatures, the warmest estimates to date for any place on Earth, occurred millions of year ago when carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere were also high, but researchers say they may be an indication th
When Voyager 1 finally crossed the “termination shock” at the edge of interstellar space in December 2004, space physicists anticipated the long-sought discovery of the source of anomalous cosmic rays. These cosmic rays, among the most energetic particle radiation in the solar system, are thought to be produced at the termination shock — the boundary at the edge of the solar system where the million-mile-per-hour solar wind abruptly slows. A mystery unfolded instead when Voyager data showed 20 y
The search for El Dorado in the Amazonian rainforest might not have yielded pots of gold, but it has led to unearthing a different type of gold mine: some of the globe’s richest soil that can transform poor soil into highly fertile ground.
That’s not all. Scientists have a method to reproduce this soil — known as terra preta, or Amazonian dark earths — and say it can pull substantial amounts of carbon out of the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s
The co-dependence of mortality risk and poverty
The Indian Ocean tsunami, the Katrina hurricane catastrophe and the Pakistan earthquake in late 2005 bear disquieting similarities in their consequences on human populations. The tsunami took 300,000 lives with more than 100,000 still missing. Although many of the missing may well be displaced rather than casualties, the death toll will likely remain in excess of 300,000. Early images from the catastrophe would have lead one to bel
Linking mitigation to regional economic development
The unprecedented scale and complexity of the relief and reconstruction efforts following the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman Island earthquake and Indian Ocean tsunami have motivated scientists, policy-makers, and development aid organizations to rethink the relationship between natural disaster mitigation and economic development. Two recent reports by the World Bank and the United Nations quantify the global exposure of populations and e
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