Late last January, while most people were battling winter’s cold and snow, University of Illinois structural geologist
Stephen Hurst left for a monthlong cruise in the South Pacific. It was no vacation, though. Hurst joined a team of scientists, engineers and technicians who set sail from Easter Island to explore the Pito Deep, a rift in Earth’s crust nearly 6,000 meters deep.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the expedition had as its goal to probe the ocean
A Johns Hopkins University graduate student may have figured out why rates of extinction were so low for many of the major groups of marine life during one of the greatest ice ages of them all, which occurred from about 330 million to 290 million years ago, late in the Paleozoic Era.
The likely answer: because those aquatic life forms that did survive during this era were singularly equipped to endure severe fluctuations in temperature and sea levels. Those that were not died i
A new ESA study predicts that the devastating Sumatran earthquake, which resulted in the tragic tsunami of 28 December 2004, will have left a ‘scar’ on Earth’s gravity that could be detected by a sensitive new satellite, due for launch next year.
The Sumatran earthquake measured 9 on the Richter scale and caused widespread devastation and death when it struck unexpectedly late last year. Thankfully, earthquakes of this magnitude are rare events, taking place perhaps once every tw
Instead of sequencing the genome of one organism, why not sequence a drop of sea water, a gram of farm soil or even a sunken whale skeleton? Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and their US collaborators have done just that, and the result is a new appreciation for the rich diversity of life that exists in the most unlikely places (Science, April 22, 2005).
Bacteria make up the greatest mass of life on earth by far and play a crucial role
The first comprehensive study of glaciers around the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula reveals the real impact of recent climate change.
Results from the study by researchers at British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) published this week in the journal Science, show that over the last 50 years 87% of 244 glaciers studied have retreated, and that average retreat rates have accelerated.
BAS and USGS analysed more than 2000 aerial photographs dating fr
Global warming link remains elusive
The first comprehensive study of glaciers on Antarctic Peninsula has uncovered widespread glacier retreat and suggests that recent climate change on the peninsula is responsible. Eighty-seven percent of the 244 marine glaciers have retreated over the last 50 years, a new study says. The widespread glacier retreat began at the northern, warmer tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. As atmospheric temperatures rose along the peninsula — more than 2.5 de
Uranium-series dating shows cave engravings oldest in Britain
A team of scientists from Bristol, The Open and Sheffield Universities have proved the engravings at Creswell Crags to be greater than 12,800 years old, making them Britain’s oldest rock art.
Creswell Crags which straddles the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border is riddled with caves which have preserved evidence of human activity during the last Ice Age. Recently, engravings on the walls and ceiling wer
When Kathryn Bard reached through the small hole that opened in a hillside along Egypt’s Red Sea coast, her hand touched nearly 4,000 years of history.
The opening that Bard, an associate professor of archaeology at Boston University, and her team’s co-leader Rodolfo Fattovich, a professor of archaeology at Italy’s University of Naples “L’Orientale,” discovered was the entrance to a large, man-made cave. Two days later at a site about 30 meters beyond this cav
The strength of hurricane activity striking the United States during the main hurricane season can now be predicted with significant accuracy thanks to a new computer model developed by scientists at University College London (UCL).
The model, unveiled in a paper in the 21 April issue of the journal Nature, will enable government, public, emergency planning bodies and insurers with US interests to receive warning in early August of the likelihood of either high or low hurrica
Potentially links climate with mountain building
A Dartmouth researcher is part of a team that has discovered a new active “thrust fault” at the base of the Himalaya in Nepal. This new fault likely accommodates some of the subterranean pressure caused by the continuing collision of the Indian subcontinent with Asia.
The study, titled “Active out-of-sequence thrust faulting in the central Nepalese Himalaya,” will be published in the April 21 issue of the journal Nature.
A new study by researchers at Oregon State University suggests that the magnitude 6.7 earthquakes that struck California’s San Fernando Valley in 1971 and Northridge area in 1994 may have been about the most powerful quakes that this specific area can sustain. Results of the research were published this week in the journal Geology.
“The study points out the potential of using paleomagnetism to estimate maximum earthquake magnitudes in some regions,” said Shaul Levi, a paleom
Maps of Antarctica need to be amended. The long-awaited collision between the vast B-15A iceberg and the landfast Drygalski ice tongue has taken place. This Envisat radar image shows the ice tongue – large and permanent enough to feature in Antarctic atlases – has come off worst.
An image acquired by Envisat on 15 April 2005 shows that a five-kilometre-long section at the seaward end of Drygalski has broken off following a collision with the drifting B-15A. The iceberg itself appear
The northernmost part of the Baltic Sea, between Finland and Sweden, recently provided an ideal location for scientists to successfully address critical issues relating to sea ice validation before CryoSat is launched in September.
Unlike last year’s CryoSat Validation Experiments (CryoVEx 2004), which focussed on land ice and took place in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic, the recent validation activities in the Baltic scrutinised issues relating to sea ice. The experiment
Scientists drill into sediments of one of the world’s oldest, deepest lakes to improve understanding of global climate change
Four University of Rhode Island oceanographers and colleagues from four other universities recently probed the ancient sediments beneath Lake Malawi in East Africa and recovered sediment samples that provide up to 1.5 million years of information about how climate in Africa has changed – the longest continuous record of such data ever collected from that
Since the time billions of years ago when Mars was formed, it has never been a spherically symmetric planet, nor is it composed of similar materials throughout, say scientists who have studied the planet. Since its formation, it has changed its shape, for example, through the development of the Tharsis bulge, an eight kilometer [five mile] high feature that covers one-sixth of the Martian surface, and through volcanic activity. As a result of these and other factors, its polar axis has not been st
A University of Liverpool scientist has discovered a new layer near the Earth’s core, which will enable the internal temperature of the Earth’s mantle to be measured at a much deeper level than previously possible.
Dr Christine Thomas, from the Department of Earth Sciences, has found a previously undetected seismic layer near the Earth’s core-mantle boundary. Her discovery will allow geophysicists to measure variations in the Earth’s internal temperature near the boundary bet
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