The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) announced that it will conduct an urgent study of the large-scale earthquake which occurred off the coast of Sumatra in Indonesia on December 26, 2004. The study will be the first to observe the actual epicenter of the earthquake that devastated coastal regions in Asian countries along the Indian Ocean coastline.

JAMSTEC is a partner in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international marine research program that

The January issue of GEOLOGY covers a wide variety of potentially newsworthy subjects. Topics include: new insights into conditions during the Neoproterozoic and Cryogenian; evidence challenging a widely used method for dating rocks; mathematical descriptions of sand ripples that may aid understanding of water flow on planetary surfaces; and evidence questioning whether Akilia Island’s metamorphic rocks really contain Earth’s earliest signs of life. GSA TODAY’s science article focuses

Events rare, but scientists call for public awareness, warning system

A dozen major earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have occurred in the Caribbean near Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in the past 500 years, and several have generated tsunamis. The most recent major earthquake, a magnitude 8.1 in 1946, resulted in a tsunami that killed a reported 1,600 people.

With nearly twenty mill

On Tuesday 21th of December 2004 a European team involved in Epica (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica) reached the drilling depth of 3270.2, which is five meters above the bedrock at Dome C, on the central plateau of the east Antarctic ice sheet. The ice is melting at the bedrock and it has been decided to stop at this depth to avoid any danger of direct contamination of the basal water. The drilling operation has therefore been terminated.

The drilling has been very successfu

Ancient woodlands in Europe may have been remarkably similar to the dense, dark forests of ancient folklore according to a paper published today in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Ecology.

The paper by Dr Fraser Mitchell of Trinity College Dublin provides important new evidence about the nature of ancient woodlands in temperate Europe, which has been the source of much controversy among forest ecologists. In 2000, the Dutch ecologist Frans Vera challenged the prev

Feasibility Study Shows Access Could Be Given Without Delay

EUMETSAT, the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, will make access to its satellite that covers the Indian Ocean available to the international community for use in constructing a tsunami warning system in the region.

EUMETSAT operates the Meteosat-5 satellite at 63°East as part of its Indian Ocean Data Coverage (IODC) Service.

In a special meeting this week, EUMETS

Scientists have discovered a new group of microbes thriving in extreme conditions deep in the Mediterranean Sea. Their existence in such hostile environments hints at the possibility of life on other planets.

The European consortium carrying out the three-year Biodeep project, which includes researchers from the University of Essex, now plans to test how the microbes tolerate these unique conditions. The group hopes their adaptations could be exploited in medicine, agricultu

Cotton plantations are highly important in Egypt, covering between 400 000 and 500 000 ha, 1/6 of all cultivated land. These crops are a vital source of foreign currency revenue through exports, and their state of health is therefore permanently under close surveillance. Cotton plants are indeed the target of a leaf-eating insect, the noctuid Spodoptera littoralis (Lepidoptera), or Egyptian Cotton Leafworm.

Known to be the main pest of cotton, it also attacks the leaves of cereal

The immediate response by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has consisted of:

* Analysis of regional maps depicting Tsunami flooded zones, affected population and natural resources.

A preliminary estimate of the inundation zone was produced by calculating the area of less than 10m and 20m elevation contour lines within 5km of the coastline for the entire region. This information was cross-checked with global population density data to estimate the likely population

College and high school students can now see how Earth’s climate is changing without leaving their computers.

NASA and other organizations use NASA’s global climate computer model (GCM) to see how Earth’s climate is changing. A GCM calculates many things, such as how much sunlight is reflected and absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere, the temperature of the air and oceans, the distribution of clouds, rainfall, and snow, and what may happen to the polar ice caps in th

People that live in Florida would expect the sands from the state beaches to blow into the air, and usually don’t think of the sands and dust from the Saharan Desert twirling around them. However, winds do carry the desert dust across the Atlantic Ocean, and scientists have been studying what they do to Florida Thunderstorms.

Scientists have discovered that these tiny particles of dust from the Saharan desert can affect thunderstorms in Florida in various ways. Dust affects

NASA scientists using data from the Indonesian earthquake calculated it affected Earth’s rotation, decreased the length of day, slightly changed the planet’s shape, and shifted the North Pole by centimeters. The earthquake that created the huge tsunami also changed the Earth’s rotation.

Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. and Dr. Richard Gross of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. said all earth

The percentage of Earth’s land area stricken by serious drought more than doubled from the 1970s to the early 2000s, according to a new analysis by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. Widespread drying occurred over much of Europe and Asia, Canada, western and southern Africa, and eastern Australia. Rising global temperatures appear to be a major factor, says NCAR scientist Aiguo Dai.

Dai will present the new findings on Weds.

Milky, turquoise-colored “dead zones,” some as large as the U.S. State of New Jersey, that are appearing repeatedly off the coast of southwest Africa, may be a sign of things to come for other areas of the coastlines of the eastern Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Toxic gas eruptions, bubbling up from the ocean floor, kill sea life, annoy human seaside residents, and may even intensify global warming. But the simple sardine may save the day, according to a study from the Pew Institute for Ocean Scien

The diversity of life varies predictably with climate and is greatest where it is warm and wet (the humid tropics). But the question “why” has puzzled biologists for over a century. In the December issue of Ecology Letters, Currie and colleagues examine three hypotheses about the origin of climatic gradients of diversity.

The “Species-energy” hypothesis proposes that high tropical plant productivity allows more species to maintain populations large enough to escape extinction. However

A new study of the earth’s 13 biomes compares the location of parks and other protected lands to the extent of habitat loss and finds that some of the most altered biomes are also the least protected. The study also found the opposite: that some of the least altered biomes are the best protected. In the forthcoming issue of Ecology Letters, Hoekstra, Boucher, Ricketts and Roberts suggest that more conservation activities should be focused in the neglected biomes.

The study found that te