A 106,000-year-long record of nitrous oxide concentrations and a shorter record of nitrogen and oxygen isotopes show that both marine and terrestrial nitrous oxide production increased in unison and effectively by the same proportional amount during the end of the last glacial period, according to Penn State researchers.
Equal terrestrial and marine production of nitrous oxide also suggest that increased storage of carbon in the oceans was not the cause of low atmospheric carbon dioxide dur
It may take them a century to advance a few meters, but the bottoms of some glaciers churn with supercooled activity, according to an article by a Lehigh University geologist in the Aug. 14 issue of Nature magazine.
Edward B. Evenson, professor of earth and environmental sciences, says his team’s 12-year study of the Matanuska Glacier in south-central Alaska sheds light on a riddle that has long baffled geologists – how glaciers are able to pick up and transport silt.
The fin
Recent drought conditions in the North Pacific Ocean near Hawaii have caused a decrease in the strength of the carbon dioxide sink, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature. A team funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and led by scientists Dave Karl and Roger Lukas of the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii used 15 years of time-series measurements to compare the precipitation, salinity and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentr
Researchers have discovered that total bromine in the lower atmosphere has been decreasing since 1998 and is now more than five percent below the peak reached that year. Bromine is one of the most active destroyers of the stratospheric ozone layer, which forms an invisible shield around the Earth, protecting it from the biologically damaging ultraviolet rays of the Sun.
Stephen A. Montzka and colleagues from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Monitoring and D
Glaciers, it turns out, aren’t so different from people – they can gain weight in their bottoms and be less active, scientists have discovered.
Glaciers, the heavyweights of landscape erosion, grow not just from snow accumulating on their surfaces but also from beneath by freezing of meltwater which can affect the rate at which they can erode, according to a team of scientists, including one from Michigan State University.
Their discovery, reported in a cover story in the Aug
New use for seismic reflection data: revealing the most dangerous fault lines on Earth
Researchers have found an important new application for seismic reflection data, commonly used to image geological structures and explore for oil and gas. Recently published in the journal Nature, new use of reflection data may prove crucial to understanding the potential for mega earthquakes.
Mladen Nedimovic, the lead author and a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a membe
Global warming will not be helped much by efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emission into the atmosphere, say two scientists who have studied the matter.
Dr. Nir Shaviv, an astrophysicist from the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Prof. Jan Veiser a geochemist at the University of Ottawa in Canada and Ruhr University in Germany, say that temperature variations are due more to cosmic forces than to the actions of man.
In a recent article publishe
Scientists in sunny, hot Florida are thinking cold thoughts since they added ozone measurements from a NASA satellite into computer weather forecast models and improved several factors in a forecast of a major winter snowstorm that hit the United States in 2000.
When scientists added ozone measurements, predictions of snowstorm intensity, snowfall amounts and the storm track all improved for a storm that hit Washington, D.C. As such, they may be able to do the same for future storms,
A new application of a decades-old technique to study Earth´s interior is allowing scientists “see” the layers in the ocean, providing new insight on the structure of ocean currents, eddies and mixing processes. The findings, reported in this week´s Science by a team from the University of Wyoming and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), could be a major step forward in the ability to remotely survey the interior of the ocean.
The study reports on a new adaptation of seismic
It´s tricky, this weather business — predicting drought, floods, rain or snow, especially months in advance. But NASA scientists at the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., are working to take the guesswork out of long-term prediction.
“We´re researching methods to predict precipitation a season or more in advance,” said Dr. Bob Oglesby, a senior atmospheric scientist at the research center. The key, he said, is understanding how the atmosphere interacts with th
Multiple sensors on ESA’s Envisat environmental satellite have been used to peer beneath a vast pall of smoke above tropical Borneo and detect fire hotspots – known to add millions of tons of harmful greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Fires occur often during the dry season on the South East Asian island of Borneo, but it isn’t only the forests that burn. Lowland tropical peat swamps are formed from layers of woody debris too waterlogged to fully decompose. Slowly deposited over thousands
On Wednesday, July 30, as scientists all over the country looked intently on, a synthetic earthquake shook a half-real building.
Part of the structure was conventional steel: full-sized structural support columns sitting in laboratories at the University of Colorado and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
But a third support column and the building floor that rested on them, forming a typical 1-story, 2-bay component of a modern steel frame building, exist
Water churns through diversion holes in the world’s largest dam – China’s Three Gorges project on the Yangtze River, imaged here by ESA’s Proba satellite this week. Seen to the left, the waters behind the dam have risen to a level of 135 metres since the sluice gates were first closed in early June, and in August Three Gorges is due to generate its first commercial hydroelectricity.
The Three Gorges project is set to create a new 600-km-long body of water on the face of the 21st century Ea
The rate at which ozone is being destroyed in the upper stratosphere is slowing, and the levels of ozone-destroying chlorine in that layer of the atmosphere have peaked and are going down — the first clear evidence that a worldwide reduction in chlorofluorocarbon pollution is having the desired effect, according to a new study.
“This is the beginning of a recovery of the ozone layer,” said Professor Michael Newchurch of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), the scientist wh
At over three thousand metres down in the north-west Indian Ocean, the Carlsberg Ridge is “probably the best ridge in the world”. So say excited scientists from Southampton Oceanography Centre who have just found the first evidence of hydrothermal activity in this previously unexplored area of a volcanic mid-ocean ridge.
The team aboard the research ship RRS Charles Darwin made the discovery on Wednesday 23 July 2003 when they detected a huge plume of smoky water. The plume is at lea
Earth’s youngest desert is shown in this July MERIS satellite image of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, over the last 40 years the Aral Sea has evaporated back to half its original surface area and a quarter its initial volume, leaving a 40,000 square kilometre zone of dry white-coloured salt terrain now called the Aralkum Desert.
As its water level has dropped 13 metres since the 1960s the Sea has actually split into two – the larger horseshoe-shaped
Feedback
