An international team of scientists and technical staff under the leadership of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research has successfully completed the deep ice coring at the Alfred Wegener Institute’s Kohnen Station in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica. Reaching a depth of 2774 metres, first on-site examinations of the ice core indicate that the ice cored at the deepest 200 metres is very old.
The investigations, carried out as part of the EPICA program (European
The development of a new dielectric model of tundra and forest-tundra for remote probing from space is being performed by Russian researchers from the L.V. Kirensky Institute of Physics, Siberian Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences (Krasnoyarsk) jointly with the US colleagues from Michigan. The researches are sponsored by the U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation (CRDF) and the Federal Agency for Science and Innovation (Rosnauka). The new model will make basis for more accurate and t
Women in Britain are happier with ‘non-traditional’ domestic arrangements, according to new Economic and Social Research Council funded research at City University. ‘Our findings contradict Neo-Conservative claims that women would be happier if they went back to being traditional housewives,’ says Professor Rosemary Crompton, who led the research. ‘The recipe for personal happiness, satisfaction with the family and lower stress at home seems to be a combination of liberal attitudes to work outsid
Manchester scientists studying global warming are predicting a much lower rise in sea levels than previously feared.
Researchers say melting glaciers and ice caps will cause just a 0.1m rise in global sea levels by 2100 – less than half the increase of several earlier predictions.
But they show that melting of glacial and mountain areas is accelerating fast leading to flooding and land slides in mountainous regions such as Nepal.
Dr Sarah Raper, a climatologist fro
New research published this week on the evolution of volcanoes sheds light on what lies deep beneath the Earth’s surface. The research, published in Nature, suggests that the plume of hot material that provides Hawaii’s volcanoes with its continuous supply of molten lava originates from a depth of almost 3000 km, at the border between the Earth’s core and its rocky mantle. This is far deeper than had been thought possible by many scientists.
Plumes are hot, narrow currents
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program is placing a new, portable atmospheric laboratory with sophisticated instruments and data systems in Niger, Africa, to gain a better understanding of the potential impacts of Saharan dust on global climate.
Dust from Africa’s Sahara desert–the largest source of dust on the planet–reaches halfway around the globe. Carried by winds and clouds, the dust travels through West African, Mediterranean,
New evidence that events in outer space affect the weather and climate of Earth has been revealed in a study by meteorologists at the University of Reading published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on Wednesday 18 January.
In their paper ‘Empirical evidence for a non-linear effect of galactic cosmic rays on clouds’, Drs Giles Harrison and David Stephenson suggest that cosmic rays have a significant effect on the Earth’s lower atmosphere – particularly on levels of cloudi
The Sahara has not always been the arid, inhospitable place that it is today – it was once a savannah teeming with life, according to researchers at the Universities of Reading and Leicester.
Eight years of studies in the Libyan desert area of Fazzan, now one of the harshest, most inaccessible spots on Earth, have revealed swings in its climate that have caused considerably wetter periods, lasting for thousands of years, when the desert turned to savannah and lakes provided water f
Although there were fewer deaths worldwide in 2005 due to earthquakes, more than 89,353 casualties were reported, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and confirmed by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Nearly all of the fatalities for the year, more than 87,000, occurred when a magnitude 7.6 hit Pakistan on Oct. 8.
In 2004, the third deadliest earthquake year on record, over 283,000 perished in the Dec. 26 magnitude 9.0 Sumatra quake a
A flotilla of space-weather satellites – ESA’s Cluster and NASA’s ACE and Wind – observed for the first time steady large-scale jets of charged particles in the solar wind between the Sun and Earth.
When such huge jets of particles impact on Earth’s magnetic shield, they could cause powerful magnetic storms on our planet. Understanding the mechanism behind these phenomena – called ‘magnetic reconnection’ – is also fundamental to many explosive phenomena, such as solar flares, p
Following three months of around-the-clock work, the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater Deep Drilling Project successfully completed its operations, extracting more than a mile-long segment of rocks and sediments from the Earth. On Dec. 4, the drill bit reached a final depth of 5,795 ft (1.1 miles, 1.77 kilometers) within the structure of the crater.
The impact crater was formed about 35 million years ago when a rock from space struck the Earth at hypersonic speed. Scientists have only recently
Hit-and-run collisions between embryonic planets during a critical period in the early history of the Solar System may account for some previously unexplained properties of planets, asteroids, and meteorites, according to researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who describe their findings in a paper to appear in the January 12 issue of the journal Nature.
The four “terrestrial” or rocky planets (Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury) are the products of an initial
Although the story on glacier fluctuations in northwestern North America over the last 10,000 years has remained largely unchanged for decades, new evidence discovered by a University of Alberta researcher will rewrite that glacial history and offer clues about our climate history during the last several thousand years.
Glacier fluctuations are sensitive indicators of past climate change, yet little is known about glacier activity in Pacific North America during the first millenniu
Climate modelers at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have succeeded in reproducing the climate changes caused by a massive freshwater pulse into the North Atlantic that occurred at the beginning of the current warm period 8,000 years ago. Their work is the first to consistently model the event and the first time that the model results have been validated by comparison to the record of climate proxies that scientists regularly use to study the Earth’s past.
“We only
The United Nations General Assembly, meeting in New York, has proclaimed the year 2008 to be the United Nations International Year of Planet Earth (Note 1). The Year’s activities will span the three years 2007-2009.
The Year’s purpose, encapsulated in it strapline “Earth sciences for society”, is to: Reduce risks for society caused by natural and human-induced hazards Reduce health problems by improving understanding of the medical aspects of Earth science Discove
International engineering firm AMEC is working with ESA to improve monitoring of ground subsidence linked to mining activity. Radar satellites in orbit 800 kilometres away can reveal millimetre-scale elevation shifts across wide areas of land.
The largest man-made hole in Africa is located 360 kilometres north-east of South African capital, Pretoria. The Palabora copper mine was excavated open-cast for 38 years: the end-result is easily visible from space: a yawning pit approac
Feedback
