A study of the ancient Mediterranean Sea will help to produce more accurate predictions of climate change.
A team led by Royal Holloway geologist Dr Michal Kucera will map sea-surface temperature of the Mediterranean over past millennia. The data will provide a new target to test the computer models on which our predictions of climate change are based.
We currently make climate change predictions using mathematical models developed using climate records of the last two centuries. T
New measurements show that the flow of ice in the Greenland ice sheet has been accelerating since 1996 during the summer melt season. The results suggest that the ice sheet may be responding more quickly to the warming climate than previously thought.
In an article published in Science magazine’s online Sciencexpress June 7, Jay Zwally, an ICESat Project scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., Waleed Abdalati, a Polar Program scientist at NASA Headquarters, W
While industrial products like chlorofluorocarbons are largely responsible for current ozone depletion, a NASA study finds that by the 2030s climate change may surpass chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as the main driver of overall ozone loss.
Drew Shindell, an atmospheric scientist from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and Columbia University, N.Y., finds that greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide are changing the climate in many ways. Some of those effects include wat
The catastrophic flooding in Jakarta in February this year could have been predicted nearly 3 weeks in advance with a new technique being developed by Dr Matt Wheeler and colleagues at the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre in Australia.
The flooding was caused by large waves of air and clouds, so called Madden-Julian Oscillations (MJOs). Using satellite data Dr Wheeler and co-workers are able to predict the occurrence of MJOs, which take about one month to move across the Indian basin a
A shower of matter from space millions of years ago could have led to drastic changes in the Earth’s climate, followed by the extinction of life on a massive scale, which also killed off the dinosaurs. This at least is a theory put forward by scientists from the University of Bonn. Normally, the solar wind acts as a shield against showers of cosmic particles, which prevents too many energy-rich particles from raining down on our atmosphere. Since 1997 scientists from Bonn, funded by the German Resea
The results of a new study suggest that rising temperatures are leaving a mark on the world. According to a report published in the current issue of the journal Science, the first flowering of plants in Britain has changed by as much as 55 days over the past few decades in response to warmer weather. The results, the scientists say, are the “strongest biological signal yet of climatic change.”
Alastair Fitter of the University of York and his father, naturalist Richard Fitter, analyzed 47 y
Researchers at Imperial College London have just begun a 5-year project to design and build tiny earthquake measuring devices to go to Mars on the 2007 NetLander mission.
Unlike the instruments on next year`s European Mars Express/Beagle II mission, the Marsquake sensors will be the first to look deep inside the planet.
The internal structure of Mars is a key to understanding some fundamental questions about the planet including whether life ever existed there.
The sensors are c
Scientists at the University of Leicester’s Space Research Centre are recreating the hostile environment found on Mars in their laboratory, with a device known as the Martian Environment Simulator (MES). The machine reproduces the temperature, air pressure and unbreathable atmosphere known to exist on Mars. The MES is currently being used to test equipment on the Beagle 2 lander, part of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Spacecraft and due to arrive on Mars during Christmas 2003. The chance o
Gold prospectors may one day rely on lowly bacteria to point them to deposits of the precious metal. Researchers have discovered that gold-laden soil often contains an abundance of spores belonging to a certain bacterium. The affinity humans have for gold aside, the ore in its soluble form is actually highly toxic to most living things. The common bacterium Bacillus cereus , however, possesses a unique resistance to the metal, allowing it to survive in a relatively vacant environmental niche:
Core samples taken from far below the ocean floor are helping a University of Edinburgh geologist to form a picture of dramatic climate changes which took place 30 to 40 million years ago. Dr Bridget Wade is part of an international team of scientists studying climate shifts between the Eocene period – the warmest cycle in the last 65 million years – and the cooler Oligocene period, which saw the first major build-up of Antarctic ice. The study could shed new light on present climate trends as the Eo
The most comprehensive picture yet of how dinosaurs evolved has been produced by a team at Bristol University.
More than 1,000 species of dinosaurs have been named since the first skeletons were dug up in the 19th century, and unravelling their patterns of evolution has been a major area of research.
Since 1980, over 150 evolutionary trees of dinosaurs have been published, most of them looking at small groups of species. The Bristol researchers have put all of these smaller
Animals may have beaten upright plants to land.
The oldest fossils of footprints ever found on land hint that animals may have beaten plants out of the primordial seas. Lobster-sized, centipede-like animals made the prints wading out of the ocean and scuttling over sand dunes about 530 million years ago. Previous fossils indicated that animals didn’t take this step until 40 million years later.
“It’s staggering that we thought for all this time that animals appeared on land
Winds bring change to Alaskan winter.
A drop in wind speed may be boosting Alaska’s tourist trade. Some parts of the tundra feel five degrees warmer than they did 50 years ago, even though average winter air temperatures have risen only by one or two degrees since then, new research finds 1 . This local trend hints that forecasts of the impacts of climate change may need to account for wind as well as temperature.
The temperature can still plummet to -40
A European team of researchers has demonstrated that sediment is transported to the deep sea via canyons in the seabed. The sediment accumulates in the head of the submarine canyons. At the end of the canyons, mud avalanches disperse into the deep sea. Scientists from the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) presented their findings at an international congress held from 7 to 10 April 2002.
With bottom landers, onboard the ship R.V. Pelagia, the researchers explored the Nazaré Canyo
Life originated on the Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago. However, the scientists are still disputing over the possible sources of the life origin. The matter is that life on our planet evolved from the molecular level to the level of bacteria organisms within 0.5 – 1 billion years, this period being very short for such an important evolutionary step. The researchers are still racking the brains over this mystery. One of the popular hypothesis asserts that some germs of life have been brought to
Using the equations of quantum mechanics, which normally govern the bizarre physics that occurs at tiny atomic scales, has enabled geophysicists to answer a much larger-scale question – what the Earth`s core is made from. At the Condensed Matter physics conference on Tuesday 9 April, part of the Institute of Physics Congress in Brighton, Prof Mike Gillan and Dr Dario Alfe from University College London will describe how their research has revealed not only the likely composition of the Earth`s core,
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