Analysis of long-term changes in Pacific Ocean temperatures may provide additional data with which to evaluate global warming hypotheses.

“Abrupt changes in water temperatures occurring over intervals of up to 25 years suggest that global warming may result as much from natural cyclical climate variations as from human activity,” said Benjamin Giese, oceanography professor in the College of Geosciences.

“Climate models constructed here at Texas A&M University were used to a

Before developers decide to make the desert bloom, they better take a look at what’s under the surface of the Earth.

That’s the conclusion of research by Texas A&M University geologist Mohamed Aly, who’s using GIS (geographic information systems) techniques to conduct engineering geomorphology assessments of some of Egypt’s newest urban developments to predict – and thus avoid – foundation problems stemming from instabilities in the underlying bedrock.

T

From 800 km in space, you would have to squint really hard to see one of these – a micron-sized phytoplankton and its armoured shell. But when a lot of them get together, say, a few trillion or so…

…what you see is the image below from the European Space Agency’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument. The sensor, carried onboard the Envisat satellite, acquired imagery of a phytoplankton bloom that occurred this summer in the north Atlantic, off the coasts of Nova Scotia

Global Environment Facility Funds New UNEP Poverty-Busting Project Promising New Hope to People and Wildlife

A pioneering new project to heal dying and degraded lands fringing Africa`s mighty deserts was launched today by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

The project, marking a new phase of the five year-old Desert Margins Programme, has numerous aims including conserving the rich and uni

Scientists’ understanding of the movement of the Earth’s crust is being helped by new observing facility which is taking measurements that may one day help predict earthquakes.

Newcastle University’s School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences has become only one of two UK centres feeding Global Positioning System (GPS) data into the International GPS Service (IGS), which researchers and professionals throughout the world – including geophysicists – can access via the Internet. The other cen

Loss and deterioraton of indigenous habitat increasingly affect natural populations worldwide. As a result of these processes, new selection pressures are imposed upon organisms, increasing local extinction rates. Simultaneously, reduced movement among remnant patches lowers colonisation rates and affects demographic and genetic population parameters. Yet, organisms with comparable life histories often respond to habitat disturbance in various ways. Why so is a matter of great importance to evolution

A new lightning index that uses measurements of water vapor in the atmosphere from Global Positioning Systems has improved lead-time for predicting the first lightning strikes from thunderstorms. The index will help greatly aid NASA Space Shuttle launches at Kennedy Space Center, Fla, and other commercial and U.S. Department of Defense launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

“Better forecasting and more advance warning of lightning strikes will help reduce the delays or cancell

Study, which shows microscopic plants keep planet warm, offers new considerations for iron fertilization efforts in the oceans

The ecological importance of phytoplankton, microscopic plants that free-float through the world’s oceans, is well known. Among their key roles, the one-celled organisms are the major source of sustenance for animal life in the seas.

Now, in a new study conducted by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California,

The movements of two gigantic Antarctic icebergs appear to have dramatically reduced the number of Emperor penguins living and breeding in a colony at Cape Crozier, according to two researchers who visited the site last month. The colony is one of the first ever visited by human beings early in the 20th century.

“It’s certain that the number of breeding birds is way down” from previous years, said Gerald Kooyman, a National Science Foundation-funded researcher at the Scripps Institution

Balloons outfitted with innovative steering devices and robot probes could be the future of planetary exploration. Dr. Alexey Pankine, a fellow at the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), presented an analysis of balloon applications for planetary science at the World Space Congress in Houston, Texas last month. His study, entitled Directed Aerial Robot Explorers or DARE, is funded by NIAC.

At the center of the DARE concept are balloons that can float in planetary atmospheres for man

JASON II reaches most of the world ocean floor and sends data ashore via the Internet

A new generation of remotely operated vehicle (ROV) capable of routine operation to depths of 6,500 meters (21,320 feet) and communicating its data back to shore via the Internet has been developed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The vehicle, JASON II, recently completed its first science cruise off the coast of Washington and Oregon and is currently at sea in the Pacific wo

Warmer or colder sea surface temperatures (SST) may affect one of the world’s key large-scale atmospheric circulations that regulate the intensity and breaking of rainfall associated with the South Asian and Australian monsoons, according to new research from NASA.

A monsoon is a wind that changes direction with the seasons. Monsoons develop from changing patterns of atmospheric circulation which are caused by changes in heating and cooling of land and oceans. One of the strongest and most

2002 Outbreak May Claim 10,000 Harbor Seals

Scientists from Göteborg University in Sweden and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) report in an upcoming issue of the journal Ecology Letters that the 2002 outbreak of phocine distemper virus, or PDV, in European harbor seals may reduce the population by more than half and that future outbreaks with similar characteristics would significantly increase the risk of population declines. Their findings are the first epidemiol

NASA scientists using satellite data have shown that shifts in rainfall patterns from one of the strongest El Niño events of the century in 1997 to a La Niña event in 2000 significantly changed vegetation patterns over Africa.

Assaf Anyamba and Compton Tucker of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt Md., and Robert Mahoney of Global Science and Technology Inc (GST) analyzed satellite derived images of vegetation from 1997 to 2000. They noticed regions of above normal “greenness” ov

An environmentally friendly solution to one of the world’s most notorious chemical contamination problems may be a step closer to reality, reports a research team from Purdue University and the University of British Columbia.

The team has identified one of the key stumbling blocks that prevent microorganisms from decomposing PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), a persistent and potentially hazardous industrial chemical that has become nearly ubiquitous in the environment. While capi

A new computer program devised by British physicists can quickly spot tiny beetles, rodent droppings and ergot (a poisonous mould) in grain destined for flour and bread manufacture. The researchers reveal details of their work today in the Institute of Physics journal Measurement Science and Technology.

Professor Roy Davies and his colleagues in the Machine Vision Research Group at Royal Holloway, University of London, in Egham, Surrey, have found they can run their program on a conventional