Seventeen years after the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, compelling new evidence suggests that remnants of the worst oil spill in U.S. history extend farther into tidal waters than previously thought, increasing the probability that the oil is causing unanticipated long-term harm to wildlife. The finding appears today on the Web site of the American Chemical Society’s journal, Environmental Science & Technology.

The study, by research chemist Jeffrey Short a

Close examination of coral reef reveals that when the rest of the world was experiencing warm weather, the Pacific was cold. And during a period of cold weather elsewhere in the world, the Pacific was warm and stormy

For more than five decades, archaeologists, geographers, and other researchers studying the Pacific Islands have used a model of late Holocene climate change based largely on other regions of the world. However, in a new study from the June issue of Current Anthropology, Mel

Fabled equatorial icecaps will disappear within two decades because of global warming, a study led by UCL (University College London) has found.

Reporting online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the first survey in a decade of glaciers in the Rwenzori Mountains, East Africa, has found that an increase in air temperature over the last four decades has contributed to a substantial reduction in glacial cover.

The Rwenzori Mountains – also known as the ’Mou

In the run up to the launch of the European MetOp-A satellite – scheduled for 17 July 2006 from Baikonur, Kazakhstan – the European scientific community has gathered at ESRIN, ESA’s Earth observation centre in Frascati, Italy, for the first EUMETSAT Polar System/MetOp Research Announcement of Opportunity workshop.

MetOp-A, developed by ESA in collaboration with the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), will be Europe’s first polar-orbi

Top European marine biodiversity experts in Lecce, Italy.

Marine biodiversity was ‘exposed’ on a number of different levels in Lecce, Italy 8th-11th May 2006, where MarBEF (Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning) a European Network of Excellence held its third general assembly in a ‘conference style’ meeting. On the agenda were talks by members on their research varying from ‘The paradox of the plankton’ and ‘The role of native and/or invasive ecosystem engineers in expla

Global warming has had a more devastating effect on some of the world’s finest coral reefs than previously assumed, suggests the first report to show the long-term impact of sea temperature rise on reef coral and fish communities.

Large sections of coral reefs and much of the marine life they support may be wiped out for good, say the international team of researchers, who surveyed 21 sites and over 50,000 square metres of coral reefs in the inner islands of the Seychelles in 19

In a groundbreaking new study in the June issue of American Naturalist, Erika J. Edwards (Yale University and University of California, Santa Barbara) and Michael J. Donoghue (Yale University) explore how leafy, “normal” plants evolved into the leafless succulent cactus.

“The cactus form is often heralded as a striking example of the tight relationship between form and function in plants,” write the authors. “A succulent, long-lived photosynthetic system allows cacti to survive periods

The Tuva reindeer quantity has fallen down to the critical level, but the population still preserves sufficient genetic diversity. Such conclusion has been made by specialists of the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, Russian Academy of Sciences, who worked at the deer-raising farms in the Todzhinski Region, Tuva. Control over genetic markers and well thought-out breeding system will help to protect the most southern domestic reindeer population from degeneration. The researchers assessed geneti

Researchers of the Institute of Ecological Problems of the North, Ural Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Schmidt Institute of Physics of Earth, Russian Academy of Sciences, have developed technology that allows to register nanoearthquakes – seismic events of minimal possible magnitudes (-4, -5). Registration of such events allows to quickly and accurately make up seismic activity maps of small-scale territories.

Investigation of seismic activity in quiet areas (including rev

BIODIVERSITY of our planet is being increasingly degraded by human activity – but to what extent and at what speed?

Scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Open University are taking part in the widest study yet of the impacts of nitrogen emissions from transport, industry and agriculture on plant species loss in Western Europe.

Over the next three years, research teams will set out to determine the time factor of species loss and its relationship to

Specialists of the Institute of Maritime Biology, Far-Easernt Branch, Russian Academy of Sciences, and Primorsky (Maritime) Production and Acclimatization Station of the Federal State Administration Primorrybvod suggest that maritime scallop should be acclimatized in low-populated waters of the Barents and White Seas. The new region suits in all respects for the Far-Eastern shellfish, which is able to feed both people and maritime inhabitants.

Northern waters of the Atlantic and P

Pollution clouds in region appear to ’mask’ aspects of South Asian climate, leading to drought and other impacts

A new analysis by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, has produced surprising results showing how air pollution, global warming-producing greenhouse gases and natural fluctuations in the climate may have a range of significant consequences on the world’s most populous region.

In a study

ETH researchers discovered a very unusual mechanism of plastic deformation in the Earth’s mantle. Furthermore, they have predicted a new family of mantle minerals. These discoveries shed new light on the plastic flow of mantle rocks inside our planet – the process that controls plate tectonics and the associated earthquakes, volcanism, and continental drift.

Plastic flow in the Earth’s mantle is the microscopic process behind plate tectonics and the associated continental drift,

In the past decade, the oyster population in New Hampshire’s Great Bay estuary has plummeted by 90 percent, due to the 1995 arrival of the oyster disease MSX. The previous century saw a slower but equally devastating demise of oysters from exuberant overharvesting. “We have seen local extinction on some reefs,” says Ray Grizzle, research associate professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Jackson Estuarine Laboratory.

Now Grizzle is working to bring oysters back to Grea

Scientists at The University of Manchester have uncovered the first evidence of seawater deep inside the Earth shedding new light on the fate of the planet’s oceans, according to research published in Nature (May 11, 2006).

For years geologists have debated whether seawater is subducted (absorbed) into the deep Earth or whether there is a ‘subduction barrier’ blocking its absorption.

For the first time scientists at The University of Manchester have positively identified

NASA and university researchers have found that thunderstorms over Tibet provide a main pathway for water vapor and chemicals to travel from the lower atmosphere, where human activity directly affects atmospheric composition, into the stratosphere, where the protective ozone layer resides.

Learning how water vapor reaches the stratosphere can help improve climate prediction models. Similarly, understanding the pathways that ozone-depleting chemicals can take to reach the stratosph