The East Pacific Rise, a vast volcanic mountain range submerged in the eastern Pacific Ocean, is one of the fastest seafloor factories on the planet. Here, along a rocky spine that runs about 1,000 miles west of South America, oceanic crust is created from magma bubbling up from deep within Earth’s interior.

Forces that shape these young oceanic plates have come into clearer focus through research conducted by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Brown Univers

For his PhD thesis, Unai Iriarte Velasco analysed strategies for reducing levels of subproducts from the disinfection of drinkable water and their application in optimising the functioning of water treatment plants.

The thesis, recently presented at the University of the Basque Country, centres on the treatment of drinkable water. Currently it is known that the chlorine employed as disinfectant reacts with the natural organic material present in surface water. This interaction i

Scientists find link between Earth’s orbit and climate change 85m years ago

An oxygen-free ocean from bottom to surface is probably the worst scenario that marine higher life can experience. Are processes and feedbacks linking the atmosphere to the deep ocean capable to cause a rapid change from an oxygen-rich to an oxygen-free deep ocean? And what are the consequences for the global carbon cycle that ultimately drive marine and terrestrial ecosystems and climate variation

Was Miller-Urey experiment correct?

Using primitive meteorites called chondrites as their models, earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis have performed outgassing calculations and shown that the early Earth’s atmosphere was a reducing one, chock full of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor.

In making this discovery Bruce Fegley, Ph.D., Washington University professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, and Laura Sch

An Earth System model developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign indicates that the best location to store carbon dioxide in the deep ocean will change with climate change.

The direct injection of carbon dioxide deep into the ocean has been suggested as one method to help control rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and mitigate the effects of global warming. But, because the atmosphere interacts with the oceans, the net uptake of carbo

An oxygen-free ocean from bottom to surface is probably the worst scenario that marine higher life can experience. Are processes and feedbacks linking the atmosphere to the deep ocean capable to cause a rapid change from an oxygen-rich to an oxygen-free deep ocean? And what are the consequences for the global carbon cycle that ultimately drive marine and terrestrial ecosystems and climate variation?

These are fundamental and burning questions on the society’s agenda. Hurricane

Cave crickets travel farther from their homes to forage — by about double — than their previously reported range, researchers have discovered. In Texas, that means protective buffer areas around caves may need to be extended to protect endangered invertebrate species that live inside and depend on the crickets.

Reporting in the journal American Midland Naturalist, a team of researchers led by Steven J. Taylor, an entomologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey and Un

A new study shows that while we’re winning isolated battles, we could well lose the war to prevent the devastating spread of the emerald ash borer in eastern Canada and the United States. It’s a failure that would cost billions of dollars in lost timber and ornamental trees, and dramatically change the forest and neighbourhood landscape in eastern North America – with even more impact than Dutch elm disease.

The soon-to-be published study is the first to document the invasive

The surface of comet Tempel 1, hit by a NASA space probe during a spectacular July 4 experiment, bears evidence of impact craters, suggesting that the comet has collided with asteroids or other space travelers in its journeys around the Sun.

Several dozen circular features that appear to be impact craters, ranging from 40 to 400 meters across, were spotted on Tempel 1 during the Deep Impact mission, according to first results from the mission team published by Science and released

Researchers from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sandia National Laboratories, together with fellow members of the Joint Water Reuse & Desalination Task Force, in coming months will be studying the best ways to desalinize – and make potable – ocean water, subsurface brines, and wastewater.

The California Department of Water Resources recently granted Sandia and its Task Force partners $1 million for the study. The Task Force – which comprises Sandia, the

Researchers propose plan for resolution

A group of Israeli, Palestinian and French scientists have proposed a possible management solution to ameliorate the water quality crisis depriving residents of drinkable water in the Gaza Strip. The study is published in the September-October 2005 issue of the journal Ground Water. This special theme issue contains 14 papers on transboundary ground water.

Israel and the Palestinian Authority share the Southern Mediterranean Coas

Warming in the Arctic is stimulating the growth of vegetation and could affect the delicate energy balance there, causing an additional climate warming of several degrees over the next few decades. A new study indicates that as the number of dark-colored shrubs in the otherwise stark Arctic tundra rises, the amount of solar energy absorbed could increase winter heating by up to 70 percent. The research will be published 7 September in the first issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Bi

Recent research results from scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center suggest that ’greening’ has begun to decline in the high latitude forested areas of North America. The work, which represents an important advance by incorporating the full extent of the latest satellite observational record to document unique vegetation responses to climatic warming, and then projecting those trends forward in time, is now being extended to circumpolar forests. The research will be highlighted in u

There are 2.6 million miles of paved roads in the United States, and new roads are being constructed daily. When parking lots and driveways are factored in, there is already enough blacktopped surface in the U.S. to cover the entire state of Ohio. Paved roads and parking spaces come in handy for our nation’s drivers, but they also come with a serious unforeseen cost— the degradation of our nation’s freshwater ecosystems.

In a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienc

Spectacular coral reefs are usually associated with warm tropical climates but can be found in the cold, inky depths off Ireland and the UK. The expansion of deep-water trawling is causing widespread damage to these long-lived corals which can take over 4,500 years to build up.

Dr Jason Hall-Spencer, a marine biologist from the University of Plymouth, has been studying these cold water coral habitats and will be revealing previously-unseen footage from recent international expe

The biodiversity of the seas and the ocean floors is a mystery for science yet to unravel. With this curiosity, a research team – including a biologist from the University of the Basque Country, is to set sail for the second time on an oceanographic campaign to study this biodiversity of the seas and the ocean floors of the Antarctic.

Bellingshausen Sea

The expedition, aboard the oceanographic vessel, Hesperides, will shortly be working in the Bellingshausen Se