Scientists have long recognized that the collision of the earth’s great crustal plates generates mountain ranges and other features of the Earth’s surface. Yet the link between mountain uplift and river drainage patterns has been uncertain. Now scientists have used laboratory techniques and sediment cores from the ocean to help explain the how rivers have changed course over millions of years.
In a report published in the December 15 issue of Nature, scientists Peter Clift of t
ESA’s Cluster mission has revealed a new creation mechanism of ‘killer electrons’ – highly energetic electrons that are responsible for damaging satellites and posing a serious hazard to astronauts.
Over the past five years, a series of discoveries by the multi-spacecraft Cluster mission have significantly enhanced our knowledge of how, where and under which conditions these killer electrons are created in Earth’s magnetosphere.
Early satellite measurements in the 1950
Owing to the gradual slowing down of the Earth’s rotation, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, based at the Paris Observatory, has announced that 2005 will contain an extra second.
The required leap second will be added at the end of 31st December, thus delaying the arrival of 2006 by one second. Although this will be the 23rd such leap second to be added since its introduction at the end of June 1972, this year’s leap second will be the first for seven
Geologic features at the Opportunity landing site on Mars were formed not by a lake that evaporated but by constant strikes from meteorites, say two Arizona State University geologists.
The site where the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity landed has sediments and layered structures that are thought to be formed by the evaporation of an acidic salty sea. The prevailing thought is that when this Martian sea existed it may have supported life forms and thus would be a prime site
Earth’s future was determined at birth. Using refined techniques to study rocks, researchers at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) found that Earth’s mantle–the layer between the core and the crust–separated into chemically distinct layers faster and earlier than previously believed. The layering happened within 30 million years of the solar system’s formation, instead of occurring gradually over more than 4 billion years, as the standard model suggests. The ne
Global warming may decimate the top 10 feet (3 meters) or more of perennially frozen soil across the Northern Hemisphere, altering ecosystems as well as damaging buildings and roads across Canada, Alaska, and Russia. New simulations from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) show that over half of the area covered by this topmost layer of permafrost could thaw by 2050 and as much as 90 percent by 2100. Scientists expect the thawing to increase runoff to the Arctic Ocean and relea
An international team worked on the verge of the Sahara to gather data on the ground and in the air, to be compared with imagery of the same region acquired by ESA satellites. The results will be used in support of an ambitious project to apply satellite remote sensing to improve monitoring and management of vast water aquifers concealed beneath the desert.
High-resolution radar as well as hyperspectral optical imagery was acquired during flights across two test areas in southern Tunis
“Hydropeaking“ in rivers and streams is becoming a problem for water ecology, particularly for fish. Rapid change in the release of water from alpine hydroelectric power stations leads to artificial discharge variations on a daily and weekly basis. Of Switzerland’s larger rivers, one in four is influenced by such water surges. Together with the wide-spread river training and channelisation, such intermittent flow is one of the main causes for the biological deficits that can be observed, for exampl
The Geological Society of London (Note 1) is convening a one-day meeting on January 9 2006 (Notes 2,3) to be chaired by its former President, Lord Oxburgh KBE FRS, to review the long-term management of radioactive wastes from a geoscientific perspective. The media are welcome to attend the meeting. There will be no news conference.
In 1999, the Geological Society of London and the British Geological Survey held a meeting that concluded deep disposal was the best technical and scientific opt
This week’s launch of MSG-2 will ensure that satellite images continue to be available to European weather forecasters well into the next decade. It also marks a new chapter in a long-term space experiment measuring the available energy that drives the weather as a whole, and helping to establish how much the Earth is heating up.
MSG-2’s main instrument is the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infra-red Imager (SEVIRI) which returns detailed 12-wavelength images of the Ear
Sandia researcher Mark Ivey spends a week in Africa on site survey for climate monitoring equipment
After a six-month stint taking cloud and aerosol measurements at Point Reyes National Seashore on the California coast, a mobile suite of climate monitoring equipment was moved to Niamey, Niger, in October for a year’s deployment there.
Going along to help survey the site and prepare for the deployment of the climate monitoring equipment was Sandia National Laborat
The deep-sea scientific drilling vessel CHIKYU, owned by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and provided to the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program–jointly funded by Japan and the United States–has recently undergone successful testing operations, according to JAMSTEC-CDEX Director-General Asahiko Taira. Successful performance results are now available for the Blow Out Preventer (BOP) handling System Integration Test (SIT). Dr. Taira also reported successful pist
A University of California, Berkeley, study of methane-producing bacteria frozen at the bottom of Greenland’s two-mile thick ice sheet could help guide scientists searching for similar bacterial life on Mars.
Methane is a greenhouse gas present in the atmospheres of both Earth and Mars. If a class of ancient microbes called Archaea are the source of Mars’ methane, as some scientists have proposed, then unmanned probes to the Martian surface should look for them at depths wher
Long after the disappearance of the glaciers that once covered much of North America, the land they rested upon is still recovering from their weight – and the slow movement of this recovery includes horizontal motion never seen before, say Purdue scientists.
The research team, led by Eric A. Calais, has found that a large swath of territory in the Northeast is slowly moving southward in relation to the rest of the continent. This region, once covered with massive ice sheets
The second satellite in the Meteosat Second Generation family is due to be launched on 21 December at 23:33 CET onboard an Ariane 5 (generic version) from Europe’s spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana. The launch window will last 28 minutes.
This is the second launch for the Meteosat Second Generation series of satellites operated by Arianespace and provided to Eumetsat by ESA. The second passenger onboard Ariane 5 will be the Insat4A multipurpose satellite (telecom, broadcasting an
The outer core of the Earth, whose composition until now has been a mystery, may consist of an alloy of iron and magnesium. This discovery by an international team of scientists with members from Linköping University in Sweden, being published in the journal Physical Review Letters, is, among other things, a major step toward being able to predict earthquakes.
In theoretical and experimental studies under extremely high pressure, the team has succeeded in mixing iron and magnesium.
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