Just as vegetables are essential to balancing the human diet, the inclusion of vegetation may be equally essential to balancing Earth’s climate models.
Scientists at MIT who were trying to create accurate models of climate change in the southern portion of the Sahara desert found that including a realistic component of vegetation growth and decay was absolutely essential. Without including the vegetation as a variable (rather than a fixed parameter), the models were not able to show the regi
A 161 million-year-old Mongolian fossil not only reveals a new species of salamanders, but also provides proof that much of the evolution of salamanders occurred in Asia.
For more than three years, scientists from the University of Chicago and Peking University in Beijing have been collecting thousands of salamander fossils, many of which preserve the entire skeleton and impressions of soft tissues, from seven excavation sites in Mongolia and China. Prior to the discovery in 1996 of the Chin
Researchers at Harper Adams University College, Shropshire, believe a ‘memory’ in the climate system could be tapped to improve long-range weather forecasts.
In the April edition of ‘Weather,’ the journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, an article co-written by Dr Peter Kettlewell will show how summer rainfall levels in the UK are affected by ‘remembered’ changes in winter air pressure over the North Atlantic ocean. The article is based upon the work of a team headed by Dr Kettlewell,
David L. Rodland, a Ph.D. student in Virginia Tech’s Department of Geological Sciences, has been studying encrustation, or the colonization of seashells by other marine organisms that live permanently attached to hard surfaces.
Examples of encrusting organisms (or epibionts) include serpulid and spirorbid worms, bryozoans, barnacles, and algae. Many epibionts produce their own calcareous tubes, shells, or skeletons, which are attached to that surface and may become fossilized along wit
Magnetic fields explosively release energy in events throughout the universe, from experiments conducted in laboratories to huge outbursts within galaxies. On the Sun, these magnetic explosions are responsible for solar flares and ejections of material from the Sun’s corona.
Similar events associated with Earth’s magnetic field drive magnetic storms, and the dramatic brightening and expansion of the northern and southern lights, the aurora borealis and aurora australis. The reconnection of
An international team of marine geologists has just completed an expedition to an area off the coast of Surinam known as the Demerara Rise. The scientists were part of the two-month Leg 207 of the NSF-supported Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) expedition in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean. The project studied periods in Earth’s history that have undergone rapid climate and ocean circulation changes and likely led to mass extinctions of plants and animals.
Three decades ago, geologists found s
Since the late 1970s, the amount of solar radiation the sun emits, during times of quiet sunspot activity, has increased by nearly .05 percent per decade, according to a NASA funded study.
“This trend is important because, if sustained over many decades, it could cause significant climate change,” said Richard Willson, a researcher affiliated with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s Earth Institute, New York. He is the lead author of the study rece
Lightning may be Mother Nature’s greatest show on Earth, but scientists now know it can produce significant amounts of ozone and other gases that affect air chemistry.
Researcher Renyi Zhang of Texas A&M University helped lead a study on the impact of lightning, and the results are surprising: Lightning can be responsible for as much as 90 percent of the nitrogen oxides in the summer and at the same time increase ozone levels as much as 30 percent in the free troposphere, the area that
Teeming with heat-loving microbes, samples of fluid drawn from the crustal rocks that make up most of the Earth’s seafloor are providing the best evidence yet to support the controversial assertion that life is widespread within oceanic crust, according to H. Paul Johnson, a University of Washington oceanographer. Johnson is lead author of a report being published March 25 in the American Geophysical Union’s publication Eos about a National Science Foundation-funded expedition he led last s
Scientists from the Universities of Sheffield and Leeds will soon be able to study some of the most elusive particles known to man, thanks to a giant telescope under the sea that looks down towards the centre of the Earth rather than up into the sky.
Together with fellow scientists from across Europe they are building a telescope 2400m (one and a half miles) under the Mediterranean Sea to detect neutrinos. These tiny elementary particles hardly exist at all, having no charge and almost no m
The melting of an Antarctic ice sheet roughly 14,000 years ago triggered a period of warming in Europe that marked the beginning of the end of the Earth’s last ice age, says a new study.
A paper in the March 14 issue of the journal Science suggests that a catastrophic collapse of an Antarctic ice sheet dumped roughly a million cubic litres per second of freshwater into the southern oceans, changing the climate thousands of kilometres to the north and ushering in a dramatic climate shift kn
A recent NASA-funded study has linked the 1991 eruption of the Mount Pinatubo to a strengthening of a climate pattern called the Arctic Oscillation. For two years following the volcanic eruption, the Arctic Oscillation caused winter warming over land areas in the high and middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, despite a cooling effect from volcanic particles that blocked sunlight.
One mission of NASA’s Earth Science Enterprise, which funded this research, is to better understand how th
When were the mountains of Wales pushed up?
It was well before the dinosaurs roamed the earth. And it happened in the aftermath of a gigantic continental collision, when England and Wales (then attached to southern Newfoundland) crashed into Scotland (then attached to north America). The muds of the sea floor were converted, then, into the hard grey slates of the Welsh hills.
Until now it has been very hard to tell exactly when these slates were formed, because the miner
Thanks to recent advances in parallel computing, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara has discovered a peculiar and important aspect of how seismic waves are generated during an earthquake. The results are published in the March 7 edition of Science Magazine.
The team, whose work is supported by the Keck Foundation, was composed of physics graduate student Eric M. Dunham, professor of physics Jean M. Carlson, and postdoctoral researcher Pasca
For centuries, they wouldn’t be caught dead next to each other.
But now a team of geologists directed by Joshua Smith, Ph.D., assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, have found a well-preserved fossil of a crab within inches of a tail vertebra from a massive plant-eating dinosaur.
This well-preserved fossil of a crab was found within inches of a dinosaur tail in Egypt’s Bahariya Oasis, the first evidence in literature of t
New findings from Queen’s researchers will help experts better predict future drought patterns and water availability in the prairies.
An international research team including biologists Kathleen Laird and Brian Cumming from the Queen’s Paleoecological Environmental Assessment and Research Laboratory (PEARL), and Peter Leavitt from the University of Regina, investigated records of drought over the past 2000 years from lake sediments in the northern Canadian prairie region (Manitoba
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