An unprecedented flash observed by the space shuttle Columbia crew in 2003 over the Indian Ocean may be a new type of transient luminous event, like lightning sprites, but one that is not necessarily caused by a thunderstorm. The discharge was observed less than two weeks before the shuttle was lost during its Earth reentry.
The authors describe the discharge as a Transient Ionospheric Glow Emission in Red, or TIGER, event. It was recorded by a video camera in the near-infrare
Cornell University researchers have created a video simulation of the deadly Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami that shows in graphic detail how the massive wave system spread outward from the epicenter of an undersea earthquake northwest of Sumatra, Indonesia.
The simulation makes it clear how the tsunami struck the coastlines of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India with such devastating force, then continued as far as East Africa.
The video, about 7 MB, can be seen o
The second Duke University-led expedition since 1999 to a deep underwater canyon will take geologists to another place in the eastern Pacific Ocean where new sea floor was forged out of volcanic lava within the past several million years.
The Pito Deep trough, positioned as deep as 19,600 feet below the ocean’s surface just west of Easter Island, will offer scientists a rare chance to study the internal geology of such ocean floor crust making processes.
The internal g
More than 250 new examples of England’s finest array of prehistoric rock art carvings, sited close to the Scottish border, have been discovered by archaeologists compiling a unique database.
Now over one thousand of the ’cup and ring’ carvings can be admired on a new website, which carries 6,000 images and is said to be the most comprehensive of its kind in the world. The site, which goes live today, includes the 250 panels unearthed during a two-and-a-half year t
The African continent is slowly being pulled apart and new data collected by University of Leeds and Royal Holloway, University of London researchers suggests that molten rock from deep within the Earth is helping the rifting. Their findings, which help explain how continents split apart, are published in Nature this week.
Ethiopia sits on a boundary where a tectonic plate is being split into two and over several million years a new ocean basin is forming. The movement of plates o
The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) announced that it will conduct an urgent study of the large-scale earthquake which occurred off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia on December 26, 2004. The study will be the first to observe the actual epicenter of the earthquake that devastated coastal regions in Asian countries along the Indian Ocean coastline.
JAMSTEC is a partner in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international marine research program that
The January issue of GEOLOGY covers a wide variety of potentially newsworthy subjects. Topics include: new insights into conditions during the Neoproterozoic and Cryogenian; evidence challenging a widely used method for dating rocks; mathematical descriptions of sand ripples that may aid understanding of water flow on planetary surfaces; and evidence questioning whether Akilia Island’s metamorphic rocks really contain Earth’s earliest signs of life. GSA TODAY’s science article focuses
Events rare, but scientists call for public awareness, warning system
A dozen major earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have occurred in the Caribbean near Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in the past 500 years, and several have generated tsunamis. The most recent major earthquake, a magnitude 8.1 in 1946, resulted in a tsunami that killed a reported 1,600 people.
With nearly twenty mill
On Tuesday 21th of December 2004 a European team involved in Epica (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica) reached the drilling depth of 3270.2, which is five meters above the bedrock at Dome C, on the central plateau of the east Antarctic ice sheet. The ice is melting at the bedrock and it has been decided to stop at this depth to avoid any danger of direct contamination of the basal water. The drilling operation has therefore been terminated.
The drilling has been very successfu
The immediate response by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has consisted of:
* Analysis of regional maps depicting Tsunami flooded zones, affected population and natural resources.
A preliminary estimate of the inundation zone was produced by calculating the area of less than 10m and 20m elevation contour lines within 5km of the coastline for the entire region. This information was cross-checked with global population density data to estimate the likely population
College and high school students can now see how Earth’s climate is changing without leaving their computers.
NASA and other organizations use NASA’s global climate computer model (GCM) to see how Earth’s climate is changing. A GCM calculates many things, such as how much sunlight is reflected and absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere, the temperature of the air and oceans, the distribution of clouds, rainfall, and snow, and what may happen to the polar ice caps in th
People that live in Florida would expect the sands from the state beaches to blow into the air, and usually don’t think of the sands and dust from the Saharan Desert twirling around them. However, winds do carry the desert dust across the Atlantic Ocean, and scientists have been studying what they do to Florida Thunderstorms.
Scientists have discovered that these tiny particles of dust from the Saharan desert can affect thunderstorms in Florida in various ways. Dust affects
NASA scientists using data from the Indonesian earthquake calculated it affected Earth’s rotation, decreased the length of day, slightly changed the planet’s shape, and shifted the North Pole by centimeters. The earthquake that created the huge tsunami also changed the Earth’s rotation.
Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. and Dr. Richard Gross of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. said all earth
The percentage of Earth’s land area stricken by serious drought more than doubled from the 1970s to the early 2000s, according to a new analysis by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. Widespread drying occurred over much of Europe and Asia, Canada, western and southern Africa, and eastern Australia. Rising global temperatures appear to be a major factor, says NCAR scientist Aiguo Dai.
Dai will present the new findings on Weds.
Arts/science video installation to open in London (January) and Scotland (February).
Two 19th century scientists, each involved with a mountain top observatory, and who each in their own way contributed to the development of ‘big science’ research in the 20th-21st centuries, are to be celebrated by an arts initiative to which University of Leicester space scientists have made an important contribution.
The “Little Earth” project relates to the points of contact between Kristian
The recent tragedy striking the coastlines of the Indian Ocean has highlighted the benefits of international cooperation in Earth Observation for the management of disaster relief, while demonstrating the scope for improved cooperation in the future.
International Charter on Space and Major Disasters
Immediately after the first tsunami struck in the Eastern Indian Ocean the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters was invoked by three different agencies. I
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