Geologists have long assumed that the Hawaiian Islands owe their existence to a “hotspot” – stationary plumes of magma that rise from the Earth’s mantle to form Mauna Loa, Kilauea and Hawaii’s other massive volcanoes. But a new study posted on the online version of the journal Science disputes that long-standing paradigm by concluding that the fixed hotspot in the Pacific was not stationary after all.
“Our research suggests that the Hawaiian hotspot actually drifted southwa
Scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have determined that human-induced changes in ozone and well-mixed greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of recent changes in the height of the tropopause.
Earlier research has shown that increases in the height of the tropopause over the past two decades are directly linked to stratospheric ozone depletion and increased greenhouse gases.
The new research uses climate model results to provide more quantitative est
Expertise derived from working on the joint NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moon Titan is now being applied to underground drilling machines. This is providing tunnelling engineers with an improved ability to virtually “see” some 40 metres into solid rock and pinpoint obstacles ahead.
It´s an old miners´ expression: “There is darkness in front of the pick”. Billions of years of geological history has laid down complex folds of strata, patterns of faulting and embed
Deep convection, or mixing, of ocean waters in the North Atlantic, widely thought to occur in only the Labrador Sea and the Mediterranean, may occur in a third location first proposed nearly 100 years ago by the explorer and oceanographer Fridtjof Nansen. The findings, reported this week in the journal Nature, may alter thinking about the ocean’s overturning circulation that affects earth’s climate.
An international team of scientists reports in Nature that convection, a pr
Scientists from six institutions, including Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, are closing the gap in deciphering one of the most puzzling aspects of the world’s oceans. “Ocean mixing,” the complex motions of seawater that span large-scale phenomena down to tiny, centimeter-sized turbulent motion, serves a key role in redistributing heat throughout the oceans. Although ocean mixing is a key element in the climate system and important for sea life for d
The largest single archaeological excavation in the UK, at the planned Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport, has yielded an unprecedented insight into the way mankind has used the landscape over the last 8000 years.
A team of around 80 archaeologists has been working at the 100-hectare (250- acre) site of Terminal 5 for over a year and has found evidence of human activity going back to hunter-gatherers in the Stone Age, around 6,000BC, as well as Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, Saxon, Medieva
Dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa may help modify clouds and rainfall both in Africa and across the tropical North Atlantic, as far away as Barbados, according to a study that uses 16 years of data from NASA satellites, ground measurements and computer models.
The dust particles act as surfaces, or kernels, for water vapor to attach to in low clouds, and for ice crystals to form around in higher clouds.
The study’s authors, Natalie Mahowald, a researcher at the National C
During summertime ozone near the Earth’s surface forms in most major U.S. cities when sunlight and heat mix with car exhaust and other pollution, causing health officials to issue “ozone alerts.” But in other parts of the world, such as the tropical Atlantic, this low level ozone appears to originate naturally in ways that have left scientists puzzled. Now, NASA-funded scientists using four satellites can tell where low level ozone pollution comes from and whether it was manmade or natural.
Science fiction writers and movie-makers have imagined a world completely covered by an ocean, but what if one really existed? Would such a world support life, and what would this life be like?
ESA could make science fiction become science fact when it finds such a world, if the predictions of a group of European astronomers are correct. The ESA mission Eddington, which is now in development, could be the key.
At the recent ESA co-sponsored ’’Towards Other Earths’’ c
A water-sensing satellite orbits more than 400 miles above Earth. An instrument-packed airplane circles 25,000 feet above three U.S. states and Brazil. Scientists, college students and other volunteers troop into the countryside, armed with sensors and notepads. It’s all about “getting the dirt.” In this case, collecting detailed information about the soil.
The objectives are two-fold — validating soil moisture data gleaned from satellites and working to find the optimum instrument for cond
United Nations-led development efforts in some of the poorest and most remote parts of the globe are being guided by images from space.
The ESA-backed UNOSAT consortium is providing an average of five new satellite-derived maps or data products to UN agencies and non-governmental organisations every week.
The poor Nicaraguan highlands municipality of Matagalpa is just one site among many where UNOSAT-supplied geographical information system (GIS) tools are being used in develop
Warming resulted in part fromfrom human activity
A group of leading climate scientists has reaffirmed the “robust consensus view” emerging from the peer reviewed literature that the warmth experienced on at least a hemispheric scale in the late 20th century was an anomaly in the previous millennium and that human activity likely played an important role in causing it. In so doing, they refuted recent claims that the warmth of recent decades was not unprecedented in the context of the
Study clarifies key chemical reaction in atmosphere
While a breeze over the ocean may cool beach goers in the summertime, a new scientific study has revealed that tiny sea salt particles drifting into the atmosphere participate in a chemical reaction that may have impacts on climate and acid rain.
The research, published in the July 3 online issue of Science Express, could have substantial implications for increasing the accuracy of climate models.
The study by scienti
Through many decades, stories about earthquakes raising or lowering water levels in wells, lakes and streams have become the stuff of folklore.
Just last November, the magnitude 7.9 Denali earthquake in Alaska was credited with sloshing water in Seattle’s Lake Union and Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, and was blamed the next day when muddy tap water turned up in Pennsylvania, where some water tables dropped as much as 6 inches.
But the relationship between seismic activity and
The discovery that an ocean ridge under the Arctic ice cap is unexpectedly volcanically active and contains multiple hydrothermal vents may cause scientists to modify a decades-long understanding of how ocean ridges work to produce the Earth’s crust.
The new results, which come from a study of the Gakkel Ridge, one of the slowest spreading ridges on Earth, have broad implications for the understanding of the globe-encircling mid-ocean ridge system where melting of the underlying mantle
The first direct evidence of fullerenes in material originating from outer space could reinforce the meteorite impact theory of mass extinction on Earth and the existence of fullerenes in interstellar dust. The existence, or not, of the closed-cage carbon molecules known as fullerenes in outer space has been an area of controversy. A team from Reading University in the UK is publishing its findings in Proceedings A, a Royal Society scientific journal.
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