Work recently published in Nature announces a significant correlation between sediment deposition in two Bolivian rivers, which flow into one of the principal tributaries of the Amazon, and climatic events of the ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation) type. It is the fruit of a research partnership between the IRD, the Bolivian Meteorology and Hydrology Centre in La Paz and scientists from the universities of Washington and California. The results represent a major advance in the study of the Amazon Bas
Researchers here have discovered that a reddish deposit seeping out from the face of a glacier in Antarcticas remote Taylor Valley is probably the last remnant of an ancient salt-water lake. The lake probably formed as much as 5 million years ago when the sea levels were higher and the ocean reached far inland.
Ohio State University scientists reported their conclusions today at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Se
Mars is kind of like Texas: things are just bigger there. In addition to the biggest canyon and biggest volcano in the solar system, Mars has now been found to have sand ripples twice as tall as they would be on Earth.
Initial measurements of some of the Red Planet’s dunes and ripples using stereo-images from the Mars Orbiter Camera onboard the Mars Global Surveyor have revealed ripple features reaching almost 20 feet high and dunes towering at 300 feet.
One way to imagine the ta
While most scientists agree that a meteor strike killed the dinosaurs, the cause of the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, 251 million years ago, is still unknown, according to geologists.
“During the end-Permian extinction 95 percent of all species on Earth became extinct, compared to only 75 percent during the KT when the dinosaurs disappeared,” says Dr. Lee R. Kump, professor of geosciences. “The end-Permian is puzzling. There is no convincing smoking gun, no compelling evi
Stratospheric data supplied by Envisat are the basis for a near-real time global ozone forecasting service now available online.
Up in the stratosphere about 25 km above our heads is the ozone layer. Stratospheric ozone absorbs up to 98% of the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet light – making the difference between a suntan and sunburn, and safeguarding all life on Earth. But chemical activity in the stratosphere ultimately due to the presence of manmade gases such as chlorofluorocarbons (CF
A violent earthquake that cracked highways in Alaska set the sky shaking as well as the land, an ESA-backed study has confirmed.
This fact could help improve earthquake detection techniques in areas lacking seismic networks, including the ocean floor. A team from the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris and the California Institute of Technology has successfully used the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite constellation to map disturbances in the ionosphere following last Nov
A giant ice shelf the size of Scotland is melting rapidly in warm Antarctic waters, a report in SCIENCE will reveal today. Thinning of the Larsen Ice Shelf – vast sections of which collapsed catastrophically during the 1990’s – was discovered by scientists at the University of Cambridge, University College London, University of Bristol and the Instituto Antártico Argentino. The findings suggest that Antarctica may be more sensitive to the effects of global warming than was previously considered.
Evidence has mounted for nearly 20 years that a great earthquake ripped the seafloor off the Washington coast in 1700, long before there were any written records in the region. Now, a newly authenticated record of a fatal shipwreck in Japan has added an intriguing clue.
Written records collected from villages along a 500-mile stretch of the main Japanese island of Honshu show the coast was hit by a series of waves, collectively called a tsunami, on Jan. 28, 1700. Because no Japanese earthqu
For at least a million years, owls throughout the West have been snapping up sagebrush voles and reducing them to gray pellets of fur, bones and teeth littering the foot of the roost.
Thanks to pack rats, however, these voles have not been forgotten.
In one Colorado cave, a pack rat collection of teeth and bones has yielded a layered slice of vole history between 600,000 and a million years ago, providing an unprecedented picture of how a species changes and evolves, and how its e
A trio of scientists including a researcher from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has found that humans may owe the relatively mild climate in which their ancestors evolved to tiny marine organisms with shells and skeletons made out of calcium carbonate.
In a paper titled “Carbonate Deposition, Climate Stability and Neoproterozoic Ice Ages” in the Oct. 31 edition of Science, UC Riverside researchers Andy Ridgwell and Martin Kennedy along with LLNL climate scientist Ken Caldeira, di
New evidence of global warming in Earth’s past supports current models for how climate responds to greenhouse gases
CA–Scientists have filled in a key piece of the global climate picture for a period 55 million years ago that is considered one of the most abrupt and extreme episodes of global warming in Earth’s history. The new results from an analysis of sediment cores from the ocean floor are consistent with theoretical predictions of how Earth’s climate would respon
The presence of a common green mineral on Mars suggests that the red planet could have been cold and dry since the mineral has been exposed, which may be more than a billion years according to new research appearing in the Oct. 24 edition of Science.
Todd Hoefen, a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) geophysicist, led a team of researchers from USGS, Arizona State University and NASA, that found abundant quantities of olivine on Mars. They based their conclusions on data obtained from a Thermal Emiss
Currents connecting Pacific and Indian Oceans are colder and deeper than thought
Scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have found that currents connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans are colder and deeper than originally believed. This discovery may one day help climate modelers predict the intensity of the Asian monsoon or El Nino with greater accuracy and with more lead-time than is currently possible.
The findings by Arnold Gordon, R. Dwi
A strong link has been confirmed between sea surface temperatures and precipitation in Africa’s semi-arid Sahel, according to a new study published in Science on October 9th. The study was co-authored by Alessandra Giannini, a climate expert with the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction (IRI), a unit of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Previously, it was not known how much land use changes may have led to the region’s recent history of prolonged drought, or whet
A new UK project could help detect evidence for life on Mars, as well as improve our understanding of how it evolved on Earth.
The aim is to develop a technique that can identify biomolecules in water that have been trapped in rocks for millions to billions of years.
As well as analysing samples from Earth, the proposed technique could be used to obtain important information from water sealed within rock samples brought back from Mars, for example. The team will also consider how
NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) has resumed measurements of the Earth’s polar ice sheets, clouds, mountains and forests with the second of its three lasers. Crisscrossing the globe at nearly 17,000 miles per hour, this new space mission is providing data with unprecedented accuracy on the critical third dimension of the Earth, its vertical characteristics.
“The first set of laser measurements is revealing features of the polar ice sheets with details never seen befor
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