Studies link strong storms with rising sea surface temperatures

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have released a study supporting the findings of several studies last year linking an increase in the strength of hurricanes around the world to a global increase in sea surface temperature. The new study strengthens the link between the increase in hurricane intensity and the increase in tropical sea surface temperature. It found that while factors such as wind shear

A natural physical process has been identified that could play a key role in secure sub-seabed storage of carbon dioxide produced by fossil-fuelled power stations.

With EPSRC funding, a team at the Centre for Gas Hydrate Research, at Heriot-Watt University is investigating how, in some conditions, seawater and carbon dioxide could combine into ice-like compounds in which the water molecules form cavities that act as cages, trapping the carbon dioxide molecules.

In the

The Department of Physical Sciences at the University of Helsinki has acquired a state-of-the-art polarimetric weather radar. The new radar is reserved exclusively for research. Its most important meteorological research target is the physics of rain clouds, and scientists intend to focus on snow and sleet in particular. Snowfall and its polarimetric measurements have hardly been studied anywhere else in the world, although in the Finnish conditions, for instance, snowfall is one of the key weath

Scientists have confirmed that climate warming is changing how much water remains locked in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, according to an article published in the Journal of Glaciology.

Using radar altimeter data from ESA’s ERS-1 and ERS-2, Jay Zwally, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and his colleagues mapped the height of the ice sheets and found there was a net loss of ice from the combined sheets between 1992 and 2002 and a corresponding rise

Poaching has significantly reduced Borneo’s population of Sumatran rhinos

World Wildlife Fund today released the results of a field survey from the island of Borneo which found that poaching has significantly reduced Borneo’s population of Sumatran rhinos, but a small group continues to survive in the “Heart of Borneo,” a region covered with vast tracts of rain forest.

The survey found evidence of at least 13 rhinos in the interior of the Malaysian state of Sa

If you’re a scientist studying the surface of Mars, few discoveries could be more exciting than seeing recent gullies apparently formed by running water. And that’s what scientists believed they saw in Mars Orbital Camera (MOC) images five years ago. They published a paper in Science on MOC images that show small, geologically young ravines. They concluded that the gullies are evidence that liquid water flowed on Mars’ surface sometime within the last million years.

There is evidence that the McGinnis Glacier, a little-known tongue of ice in the central Alaska Range, has surged. Assistant Professor of Physics Martin Truffer recently noticed the lower portion of the glacier was covered in cracks, crevasses, and pinnacles of ice–all telltale signs that the glacier has recently slid forward at higher than normal rates. It has not been determined whether the glacier continues to surge.

Truffer, of the Geophysical Institute’s Snow Ice and Perma

There is a great interest in biogas as an environmentally friendly alternative to oil and other fossil fuels. However, biogas has been criticized for releasing methane. As a greenhouse gas, methane is 20-25 times worse than carbon dioxide. But new calculations now show that biogas is nevertheless better than fossil fuels as long as the methane emissions are lower than 10-20 percent. It was previously believed that the cut-off point was about 5 percent.

“The margins are thus consi

Imagine a space tool so revolutionary it can determine the impact of climate change, monitor the melting of glaciers, discover invisible waves, predict the strength of hurricanes, conserve fish stocks and measure river and lake levels worldwide, among other scientific applications. This instrument is not the subject of a science-fiction novel. In fact, four of them are already operating 800 kilometres above Earth.

Fifteen years ago this ground-breaking instrument, called a radar altimeter,

Three unique photographs of a recent volcanic eruption in a remote part of Ecuador show a plume unlike any previously documented, and hint at a newly recognized hazard, say scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“The usual volcanic plume consists of a stalk capped with an umbrella, and resembles the mushroom of an atom bomb blast,” said geology professor Susan Kieffer, “but the umbrella on this plume was wavy, like the shell of a scallop.”

In a pap

A NASA-funded expedition to the Arctic to map the thickness of snow has a legion of unexpected furry fans hailing from one of the world’s coldest regions: polar bears.

From mid-March to mid-April, researchers embark on an Arctic field experiment using a new airborne radar to determine the accuracy of satellite measurements of snow’s thickness atop polar sea ice. Snow thickness is just one of several cutting-edge measurements taken by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiom

A review of the findings from more than 100 peer-reviewed studies shows that although many aspects of the global water cycle have intensified, including precipitation and evaporation, this trend has not consistently resulted in an increase in the frequency or intensity of tropical storms or floods over the past century. The USGS findings, which have implications on the effect of global climate change, are published today in the Journal of Hydrology.

“A key question in the global climate

Scientists at the University of the West of England have discovered how bacteria involved in crop disease can evolve to avoid the natural defences of the plant. This discovery is crucial to the understanding of how disease can spread fast even when plants can naturally defend themselves.

The research team found that the bacterial colony changes to one lacking the gene that normally triggers a defence mechanism from the plant. In effect the bacteria disguise themselves to ensure the

The USGS and the Government of Afghanistan Ministry of Mines and Industry have completed the first-ever assessment of Afghanistan´s undiscovered petroleum resources and have determined that the resource base is significantly greater than previously understood. The assessment was conducted over the past two years, with funding provided by the U.S. Trade and Development Agency.

The estimates increase the oil resources by 18 times and more than triple the natural gas resources.

NASA scientists have found that a major form of global air pollution involved in summertime “smog” has also played a significant role in warming the Arctic.

In a global assessment of the impact of ozone on climate warming, scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York, evaluated how ozone in the lowest part of the atmosphere changed temperatures over the past 100 years. Using the best available estimates of global emissions of gases that produce

Behavior of Scandinavian Ice Sheet at the end of the last Ice Age may preview loss of Greenland Ice Sheet due to global warming

The retreat of a massive ice sheet that once covered much of northern Europe has been described for the first time, and researchers believe it may provide a sneak preview of how present-day ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will act in the face of global warming.

The study, which appears in the current issue of the journal Science, was led