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

A biological process using three different types of fungi to control common plant diseases and mite pests has been developed by researchers at the Hebrew University’s Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences in Rehovot.

Use of these fungi enables crops to overcome such plant diseases and pests without having to apply environmentally-polluting chemicals, said Abraham Sztejnberg, the Hebrew University’s Francis Ariowitsch Professor of Agriculture, a member of the resear

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

Forests form an integral part of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change because they act as terrestrial “sinks” to soak up the carbon emissions that are contributing to global warming. Countries that have ratified the protocol can offset their carbon emissions quota by planting trees, either at home or in developing countries. But how efficient is this “carbon trading” and how good are forests at absorbing these extra carbon emissions?

Nearly one hundred of the world’s leading experts on globa

In the latest edition of Nature (March 13th, 2003) a group of scientist led by professor Pertti Hari from the University of Helsinki presents a novel observation: ultraviolet radiation induced a flux of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from pine needles to the atmosphere. This result is interesting because nitrogen oxides participate in several essential chemical reactions in the atmosphere. On the other hand, plants can utilize the nitrogen of NOx as their nutrient.

It has been difficult to detect the

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

Scientists researching the population numbers of saiga antelope in Russia have found that in the case of the male, there may be a deadly truth in the old boast, ’So many women, so little time.’

Making use of data gathered from a 10-year field study, scientists report in Nature today that saiga antelope, which rank in the World Conservation Union’s category of most endangered species, are being pushed closer to extinction because there are not enough male antelopes to mate with the fe

The United Nations World Water Development Report: Water for People, Water for Life considers the water in Finland cleanest in the world. The secret is not only in the quality of raw water, but also in the water treatment methods.

The report, published last week, ranked 122 countries based on the quality of their water and their ability and willingness to improve it. Finland also scored the highest number of points on the overall Water Poverty Index which graded 147 countries according to th

Researchers from Imperial College, England have just shown in a forthcoming article in the journal Ecology Letters, that insect larvae can use an engineered toxin (Cry1Ac) as a supplementary food source.

They found that toxin-resistant larvae of the Diamondback Moth developed faster and had a greater pupal weight in the presence of the toxin. This could be a genetic effect, linked indirectly to the presence of a resistance allele but more simply, could be due to resistant insects enhancing

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