With the amount of shopping days until Christmas fast running out, consumers who would like to make ‘green’ choices are often helpless to change their behaviour, according to research at the University of Surrey. The project, which was funded by ESRC, warns policymakers that eco-taxes and information campaigns have only a limited impact on how people behave. ‘Many people care about the environment but they are stuck in unsustainable patterns of behaviour because they just don’t have access to
Ultraviolet flashes associated with surface crustal fields, not poles
Auroras similar to Earth’s Northern Lights appear to be common on Mars, according to physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, who have analyzed six years’ worth of data from the Mars Global Surveyor.
The discovery of hundreds of auroras over the past six years comes as a surprise, since Mars does not have the global magnetic field that on Earth is the source of the aurora
The European Space Agency (ESA) announced today support of a new program that will include development of an instrument for testing deep soil samples on Mars in a European mission called ExoMars. A researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara will direct the development of the instrument.
“We are very excited about this,” said Luann Becker, research scientist with the Institute of Crustal Studies at UC Santa Barbara. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Testing by
For a mathematician, Joseph Biello spends a lot of time thinking about the weather. But the UC Davis assistant professor isn’t looking out the office window. He is using mathematical theory to build a model of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, a tropical weather pattern that influences drought and rainfall in the western U.S.
The Madden-Julian Oscillation was discovered in 1972 when researchers looked closely at meteorological data. It lasts 30 to 60 days and appears as cl
Glaciers, rivers and shifting tectonic plates have shaped mountains over millions of years, but earth scientists have struggled to understand the relative roles of these forces and the rates at which they work.
Now, using a new technique, researchers at the University of Michigan, California Institute of Technology and Occidental College have documented how fast glaciers eroded the spectacular mountain topography of the Coast Mountains of British Columbia.
Their work
For the last time yesterday, the Russian high-altitude research aircraft Geophysica and the German Aerospace Centre’s (DLR) Falcon set off for tropical thunderclouds in Darwin (Australia). Over the last four weeks, the research aircraft undertook a total of nine joint measurement flights in the tropical atmosphere at the interface between the troposphere and stratosphere. Within the framework of the SCOUT-03 Project, they collected data which will be incorporated into the discussion on climate
Images show never-before-seen fault lines – plus cows, trees
Researchers have completed the most meticulous survey ever made of the San Andreas Fault, and they’ve found detailed features that nobody could have seen before.
Michael Bevis, Ohio Eminent Scholar in geodynamics and professor of civil and environmental engineering and geodetic science at Ohio State University, unveiled the first images from the ambitious new survey Wednesday at the American Geophysic
Levels of ozone at extreme altitudes may add to the medical dangers faced by mountaineers
Not only is the air around the world’s highest mountains thin, but it’s thick with ozone, says a new study from University of Toronto researchers.
In fact, say the scientists, the ring of ozone that exists around the Tibetan plateau, which rises 4,000 metres above sea level and includes such famous peaks as Mount Everest and K2, is as concentrated as the ozone found in hea
Absent any climate policy, scientists have found a 70 percent chance of shutting down the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean over the next 200 years, with a 45 percent probability of this occurring in this century. The likelihood decreases with mitigation, but even the most rigorous immediate climate policy would still leave a 25 percent chance of a thermohaline collapse.
“This is a dangerous, human-induced climate change,” said Michael Schlesinger, a professo
While the rupture zones of recent major earthquakes are immune to similar-sized earthquakes for hundreds of years, they could be vulnerable to even bigger destructive temblors sooner than scientists suspect, according to analysis by University of Colorado seismologist Roger Bilham.
Bilham and his research colleagues explained that the magnitude 9.3 Indian Ocean earthquake of December 2004 showed scientists that a giant earthquake can rupture through a region with a recent histor
Scientists for years have been at a loss to explain unexpectedly high levels of mercury in fish swimming the rivers and streams of areas like eastern Oregon, far away from industrial sources of mercury pollution such as coal-fired power plants.
New University of Washington research suggests mercury can be carried long distances in the atmosphere, combining with other airborne chemicals as it travels. These compounds are much more water-soluble and therefore are more easily rem
New simulations of 21st-century climate show that human-produced changes in land cover could produce additional warming in the Amazon region comparable to that caused by greenhouse gases, while counteracting greenhouse warming by 25% to 50% in some midlatitude areas. The simulations from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) show the importance of including land cover in computer-model depictions of global change. The results will be published in the December 9 issue of Science.
Berkeley Lab Scientist Studies Possible Precursors in Micro-quakes
A geophysicist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has identified possible seismic precursors to two recent California earthquakes, including the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that wreaked havoc throughout the Bay Area.
After sifting through seismic data from the two quakes, Valeri Korneev found a spike in the number of micro-earthquakes followed by a perio
After some 400 years of relative stability, Earth’s North Magnetic Pole has moved nearly 1,100 kilometers out into the Arctic Ocean during the last century and at its present rate could move from northern Canada to Siberia within the next half-century.
If that happens, Alaska may be in danger of losing one of its most stunning natural phenomena – the Northern Lights.
But the surprisingly rapid movement of the magnetic pole doesn’t necessarily mean that our plane
The San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD)-the first underground observatory to provide physical samples and real-time seismological data from deep inside an active fault zone-is yielding surprising new clues about the origin of earthquakes. SAFOD scientists from around the world will discuss these new findings on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) at Moscone Center West in San Francisco.
SAFOD is a major research component of EarthScop
Scientists studying the effects of carbon on climate warming are very likely underestimating, by a vast amount, how much soil carbon is available in the high Arctic to be released into the atmosphere, new University of Washington research shows.
A three-year study of soils in northwest Greenland found that a key previous study greatly underestimated the organic carbon stored in the soil. That’s because the earlier work generally looked only at the top 10 inches of soil, sa
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