This perspective image of a fractured crater near Valles Marineris on Mars was obtained by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board the ESA Mars Express spacecraft.
The image was taken during orbit 61 in January 2004 with a resolution of 12. 5 metres per pixel. It shows part of a cratered landscape to the north of the Valles Marineris, at 0.6° S latitude and 309° E longitude, with this crater having a fractured base.
This crater has a rim diameter of 27.5 kilometres
Living in New Orleans means having to live with water. It’s everywhere. The city’s elevation ranges from about 12 feet (3.65 meters) above sea level to as much as six-and-a-half feet (2 meters) below sea level. Some believe the city faces an ongoing battle against submersion by the rising Gulf of Mexico.
New research reported by a team led by a University of Illinois at Chicago earth scientist suggests the sea level in the lower Mississippi delta near New Orleans has been rising a
Discovery suggests presence of diamonds in northern Saskatchewan
Researchers at the University of Alberta have found evidence that a 2,000-kilometre corridor stretching diagonally across northern Canada was under tremendous pressure to split in two about 2.7 billion years ago. It is the first evidence suggesting enormous continental landforms and plate tectonics existed that long ago. “Rifts are one hallmark of plate tectonics, and there is a huge debate in our field about wheth
Scientists investigating the possible effect of underwater seismic pulses on marine mammals have conducted a series of tests, designed to better understand the force of sound waves generated by shipboard airguns. These instruments are used by some 100 vessels worldwide to penetrate into the seabed for oil exploration and geophysical research, with an estimated 15 to 20 active on any given day.
Researchers from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University conducted tests in
Now more than 100 000 kilometres away from Earth, ESA’s Moon-bound spacecraft SMART-1 looked back at Earth and returned this planetary perspective of the Middle East and Mediterranean Sea.
’Smart’ usage of the solar-electric propulsion system (the ion engine) has saved a lot of fuel and the spacecraft will get to the Moon earlier than expected.
Almost 20 kilograms of the xenon fuel could be saved out of the original 84 kilograms, which could then be used to get closer to
In the first study to directly measure when and how quickly rivers outside of growing mountain ranges cut through rock, geologists at the University of Vermont have determined that it was about 35,000 years ago that the Susquehanna and Potomac rivers, respectively, began carving out the Great Falls of the Potomac and Holtwood Gorge. Great Falls, located about 15 miles outside of Washington, D.C., hosts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year; Holtwood Gorge lies along the Susquehanna River, nea
Although it covers more than two-thirds of Earth’s surface, much of the deep sea remains unknown and unexplored, and many questions remain about how its environment changes over time.
A new study led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, has shed new light on significant changes in the deep sea over a 14-year period. Scripps Institution’s Henry Ruhl and Ken Smith show in the new issue of the journal Science that changes in climate at
Invitation to a press conference for the start of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s Arctic Coring Expedition, ACEX, on board the icebreaker Oden in the port of Tromsø, Norway on Friday 6 August 2004 at 11.00
Three icebreakers will carry a team of international scientists to the Arctic Ocean next month (8 August), to study its geological history. The Arctic Coring Expedition, ACEX, aims to reach several hundreds of metres into the sediments of the Lomonosov Ridge, an unde
These images of ‘yardangs’, features sculpted by wind-blown sand seen here near Olympus Mons on Mars, were obtained by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board the ESA Mars Express spacecraft.
This image was taken during orbit 143 with a resolution of 20 metres per pixel. This scene shows a structure south of Olympus Mons at 6° N latitude and 220° E longitude, which was probably formed by the action of the wind. Loose sand fragments were transported by wind, and impacted on the be
The lowermost region of the earth’s mantle, the D” layer, has presented great problems to geophysicists for a long time. This irregularly bounded layer, which is about 150 kilometres thick on average, shows very different physical properties to those lying above. The reason why the Earth’s mantle at the interface to the core should have such anomalous structure and properties could not be convincingly explained until now. Artem R. Oganov from the Laboratory for Cristallography at ETH Zurich and Shig
Within the €3.6 million EU research project PROMESS1 (PROfiles across MEditerranean Sedimentary Systems), with an EU contribution of €2.7 million, European scientists have collected 500 000 year-old sediment cores from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. These samples will allow researchers to reconstruct climate variations since pre-historic times, thus providing keys for understanding what is happening to Earth’s climate now. Ocean drilling is crucial in understanding changes in climate, as the s
An embryonic rift valley in Botswana, the southwestern extension of the East African Rift System, where some of the earliest hominids have been discovered, may also hold answers to continental breakup, according to a University of Missouri-Rolla geologist who is studying how the rift has formed.
“This rift will provide us with an early snapshot of how continental rifting all begins,” says Dr. Estella Atekwana, an associate professor of geology and geophysics at UMR. The study of rift basins
Once dismissed as a nautical myth, freakish ocean waves that rise as tall as ten-storey apartment blocks have been accepted as a leading cause of large ship sinkings. Results from ESA’s ERS satellites helped establish the widespread existence of these ’rogue’ waves and are now being used to study their origins.
Severe weather has sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length during the last two decades. Rogue waves are believed to be the major cause in
While rovers and orbiting spacecraft scour Mars searching for clues to its past, researchers have uncovered another piece of the red planet in the most inhospitable place on Earth — Antarctica.
The new specimen was found by a field party from the U.S. Antarctic Search for Meteorites program (ANSMET) on Dec. 15, 2003, on an ice field in the Miller Range of the Transantarctic Mountains, roughly 750 kilometers from the South Pole. This 715.2-gram black rock, officially designated MIL 03346, w
The exploration of near-Earth space will enter a new phase on 26 July when a spacecraft called Tan Ce 2 (Explorer 2) lifts off from Taiyuan spaceport, west of Beijing, on a Chinese Long March 2C rocket. The launch is currently scheduled to take place at 08:23 BST (07:23 GMT).
Tan Ce 2 is the second spacecraft to be built for the Double Star programme, a unique collaboration between Chinese and European scientists. Its predecessor, Tan Ce 1 (Explorer 1), was successfully launched on a sim
Collisions in the Asteroid Belt result in the asteroids being completely destroyed and shattered into countless pieces. Computer simulations predict that most of these fragments will eventually fall into the Sun. Some of them, however, will hit the Earth after millions of years as meteorites. It is possible that this could also occur much earlier. In certain positions in the Asteroid Belt, the orbiting time of an object around the sun is a multiple of the orbit of the giant planet Jupiter. The so-
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