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

A recent study conducted in eastern Greenland and published in the October 31 issue of the Science magazine provides new understanding of the dynamics of arctic lemming populations. Olivier Gilg and Ilkka Hanski from the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Benoît Sittler from the University of Freiburg, Germany, combined long-term field observations and mathematical modelling of what is probably the simplest vertebrate predator-prey community in the world. In the study area in the Karup Valley, at

The treatment of waste has become a problem of international importance. Concretely, the recycling of plastics from waste electrical and electronic equipment is particularly significant due to use in their manufacture of critical components such as specific bromates or heavy metal additives. Thus the need to find ecological solutions for the treatment of these goods.

This European project arose as a result of the need to continue with the work started in 1998 with the COMBIDENT project, fina

The only natural habitat of the polar bear is under increasing threat as a consequence of the dramatic thinning of the Arctic sea ice. The link between the thinning of the ice and rising temperatures has been discovered by scientists at UCL and the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, whose findings are due to be published in the 30th October edition of Nature.

The thinness of the ice covering the Arctic Ocean, approximately three metres deep, makes it far more vulne

Australian farmers are trialling a satellite-based pasture monitoring system which dramatically improves their ability to make informed farm management decisions.

Utilising the MODIS sensor in the Terra satellite, Australia’s ’Pastures From Space’ consortium can now deliver much more detailed data relating to pasture growth rates (PGRs), says CSIRO Livestock Industries’ Mr Gonzalo Mata.

“We can now provide farmers with 16-times more detail about their pastures,” Mr Mata says. “Inst

The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park may be the key to maintaining groves of cottonwood trees that were well on their way to localized extinction, and is working to rebalance a stream ecosystem in the park for the first time in seven decades, Oregon State University scientists say in two new studies.

The data show a clear and remarkable linkage between the presence of wolves and the health of an entire streamside ecosystem, including two species of cottonwoods and the

Cornell University microbiologists, looking for bioremediation microbes to “eat” toxic pollutants, report the first field test of a technique called stable isotopic probing (SIP) in a contaminated site. And they announce the discovery and isolation of a bacterium that biodegrades naphthalene in coal tar contamination.

Although naphthalene is not the most toxic component in coal tar, the microbiologists say their discovery might eventually help to speed the cleanup of hundreds of 19th and 20

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

Recently observed change in Arctic temperatures and sea ice cover may be a harbinger of global climate changes to come, according to a recent NASA study. Satellite data — the unique view from space — are allowing researchers to more clearly see Arctic changes and develop an improved understanding of the possible effect on climate worldwide.

The Arctic warming study, appearing in the November 1 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, shows that compared to the 19

Researchers at Uppsala University and the Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences (SLU) report in the latest issue of Nature that they have identified a regulatory mutation in a gene for a known growth factor that makes pigs more muscular and less fat than wild boars.

Most characteristics, such as common diseases like diabetes, have a multifactorial background, which means that they are influenced by many different genes and environmental factors. Even though we know the entire DNA sequ