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

A team of scientists, including several from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), has determined that human-related emissions are largely responsible for an increase in the height of the tropopause – the boundary between the two lowest layers of the atmosphere. The research results, which will be published July 25 in the journal Science, provide additional evidence that emissions from power plants, automobiles, and other human-related (or anthropogenic) sources are having profound im

While the high ocean surface temperatures during the 1997-98 El Nino bleached coral reefs in more than 50 tropical countries worldwide, patches of coral did survive in or near the damaged reefs. A new study of these patches identifies factors likely to protect these threatened marine ecosystems during climate change.

“As baseline sea surface temperatures continue to rise, climate change may represent the single greatest threat to coral reefs worldwide,” say Jordan West of the U.S. En

While European environmentalists see quarries as scars in the Earth, these industrial operations may actually play a critical role in preserving rare species. New research shows that quarries provide the only suitable habitat for at-risk butterflies in some places, suggesting that current policies of filling in old quarries are misguided.

“Increasing evidence is revealing the counterproductivity of such practices,” say Jiri Benes, Pavel Kepka and Martin Konvicka, all of the University of So

Forget blue skies research, it is clouds that have focused minds at the University of Leicester where scientists are tackling the causes of ozone depletion.

Atmospheric scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy are spearheading the MAPSCORE project, a European Commission Environment project which investigates a major cause of ozone depletion – high altitude polar clouds which activate the chlorine originally from CFCs and lead eventually to severe ozone destruction.

Poultry production in the Netherlands has to change for a prosperous future. This is a mutual task of poultry producers, consumers, governmental and non-governmental organisations, and knowledge institutions. The outbreak of avian influenza in the beginning of 2003 in the centre of the Netherlands made the urgency of change quite clear. This is the outcome of an investigation by researchers of Wageningen University and Research Centre. In a report (in dutch) they provide building blocks to facili

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

Coral reefs across the Caribbean have suffered a phenomenal 80% decline in their coral cover during the past three decades, reveals new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, published this week in the international online journal Science Express.

The amount of reef covered by hard corals, the main builders of reef framework, has decreased on average from 50% to just 10% in the last 25 years. Although the majority of the l

Gonzaga Santesteban, lecturer at the Public University of Navarre, concluded his thesis stating that a generalised recommendation on vine irrigation cannot be offered as the factors involved are diverse: the terrain where the vine is planted, the climate on the zone and the quantity of grape involved.

Problems with irrigation policy

Gonzaga Santesteban has investigated “The effect of irrigation on the quality of the grape and the wine in the Tempranillo variety”.

It

A study published today reveals that a common industrial chemical causes sexual deformities in oysters, producing large numbers of hermaphrodite animals. The chemical, nonylphenol, is a breakdown product from a surfactant widely used in detergents, dispersing agents, herbicides, spermicides and cosmetics.

Dr Helen Nice who undertook this study at Royal Holloway, University of London, says, ‘Our results may cast doubt on the widespread use of this chemical in many human products including co

In a 17-year experiment on Vermont’s Camel’s Hump, three Dartmouth researchers find that lead moves very slowly though the soil. Using the highly accurate technique of isotopic analysis for the first time at this field site, the researchers traced several varieties of lead with different atomic weights.

Their study was published online on July 12 on the Environmental Science & Technology Web site, a journal of the American Chemical Society.

“This definitively supports a few

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