The gradual subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate beneath the North American plate puts tremendous stress on the seafloor, creating cracks and fissures, hydrothermal vents, seafloor spreading, and literally hundreds of small earthquakes on a near-daily basis.
Now a North American team of scientists has documented for the first time a new phenomenon – the creation of a void in the seafloor that draws in – rather than expels – surrounding seawater. They report their discovery in the July 15 issue
People say size doesn’t matter, and that may be true for tiny plankton, those free-floating ocean plants that make up the bottom of the marine food-chain. Little plankton may be able to change the weather, and longer term climate, in ways that serve them better.
It’s almost hard to believe, but new NASA-funded research confirms an old theory that plankton can indirectly create clouds that block some of the Sun’s harmful rays. The study was conducted by Dierdre Toole of the Woods Hole Oce
A team of researchers led by the University of Sheffield and supported by English Heritage have found eighty 13,000-year-old carvings in limestone rock of Church Hole Cave, at Creswell Crags in Nottinghamshire. The carvings are a unique find and form the most elaborate cave art ceiling in the world.
The carvings, which appear on the ceiling of the cave, represent animal figures, including deer, bears, birds and possibly dancing women.
Dr Paul Pettitt, of the Department of Archaeolog
If raindrops on roses are among your favorite things, University of Washington researchers have encountered some monster drops that could change your mind.
On two occasions, separated by four years and thousands of miles and in very different conditions, raindrops were measured at sizes similar to or greater than the largest ever recorded. The largest ones were at least 8 millimeters in diameter, about the same as the largest previously observed, and were possibly a centimeter – about four
This morning a team of forty scientists from seven UK universities will travel to the Azores to join hundreds more in the largest international atmospheric field campaign of its type ever attempted.
The exciting mission will track and investigate a mass of polluted air as it leaves the United States and travels across the Atlantic to the UK and mainland Europe. Scientists will measure chemical reactions within the air-mass as it travels, quantifying the resulting pollutants delivered to Eu
Deep in the Antarctic interior, buried under thousands of meters [more than two miles] of ice, lies Lake Vostok, the world’s largest subglacial lake. Scientists believe that the waters of Lake Vostok have not been disturbed for hundreds of thousands of years, and there are tantalizing clues that microbes may exist there that have been isolated for at least as long.
Now, the most comprehensive measurements of the lake–roughly the size of Lake Ontario in North America–indicate that it is
A powerful new instrument heading to space this Saturday is expected to send back long-sought answers about greenhouse gases, atmospheric cleansers and pollutants, and the destruction and recovery of the ozone layer. Only a cubic yard in size but laden with technical wizardry, the High-Resolution Dynamic Limb Sounder (HIRDLS) will measure a slew of atmospheric chemicals at a horizontal and vertical precision unprecedented in a multi-year space instrument.
Scientists at the National Center f
On the 17 and 18 June a meeting was held at the head office of AZTI-TECNALIA in the Basque port of Pasaia to launch a new project for a Spanish System of Operational Oceanography. Working on the project are the principal research centres, bodies in the field of oceanography and meteorology as well as other agencies involved in coastal management such as the Spanish Ports Authority. More than 50 experts, national and international, bringing together a wide range of multidisciplinary experience, took
Recent research has shown that over the past 50 years the evaporative demand at the terrestrial surface has decreased in many regions, while rainfall has remained constant or even increased a little, effectively making the land wetter. Much of the research to date has been undertaken in the Northern Hemisphere, but a new report details the changes specific to Australia between 1970 and 2002. Results are published this week in the International Journal of Climatology.
In the time period stud
Conservation workers have had their first look at satellite-derived map products that show a remote habitat of endangered African mountain gorillas in unprecedented detail. Production versions of these prototype products will help protect the less than 700 of the species remaining alive.
“It’s very exciting to get a look at some of the products we’re going to be able to take into the field in future,” remarked Maryke Gray, regional monitoring officer of the International Gorilla Conservation
Camping out, for anything up to two months, on vast ice sheets in the Arctic is just one of the challenges scientists faced performing the first of a series of six validation experiments in support of ESA’s CryoSat mission.
CryoSat will be the first Earth Explorer to be launched as part of ESA’s Living Planet Programme. Due for launch at the end of this year, it will measure changes in the elevation of ice sheets and sea ice with unprecedented accuracy in order to determine whether or
They will come by land, sea, and air to probe the skies and take measure of the air we breathe. And the University of New Hampshire will be at the center of it all – the largest and most complex air quality-climate study ever attempted.
Satellites will fly overhead scanning the Earth’s atmosphere, research aircraft will make tight spirals down a 40,000-foot column of air and “sniff” for hundreds of chemical species. Planes will fly wingtip-to-wingtip gathering air samples and comparing meas
Scientists affiliated with the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), an international scientific research program designed to contribute fundamental knowledge to the topics of climate change, geologic hazards, energy resources, and Earth’s environment, departed Astoria, Ore., June 28, for the first leg of six planned expeditions. At the Juan de Fuca Ridge, off the coast of British Columbia, the first IODP expedition will undertake hydrologic, microbiological, seismic and tracer stud
A paper published this week in the journal Science supports the hypothesis that heat transfer by ocean currents – rather than global heating or cooling – may have been responsible for the global temperature patterns associated with the abrupt climate changes seen in the North Atlantic during the past 80,000 years.
Authored by the University of Bremen’s Frank Lamy and colleagues, the paper provides new evidence that Southern Hemisphere climate may not have changed in step with Northern Hem
A new study shows that electron interactions may have nearly the same importance as chemical luminescence in exciting the atmospheric molecules that cause auroras. Campbell et al. suggest that nitric oxide molecules are promoted into potentially glowing, vibrational excited levels by a short-lived negative ion that is formed as a result of electron impact. Previous studies had reported that chemiluminescence, where nitrogen and oxygen molecules interact to form excited nitric oxide, was the main so
Elephants may be able to communicate over long distances but it’s hard to tell, because they’re not talking. Instead, they may be transmitting infrasonic signals through the ground with seismic waves. Gunther et al. studied the range of low-frequency vocal sounds made by African elephants and suggest that the signal’s two kilometer [one mile] range can propagate further than the animals’ airborne vocalizations.
Their study suggests that it is possible for elephants to communicate over long
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