Winds and changing climate converted parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and Texas into a giant ’dust bowl’ in the 1930s. In response, the 1937 ’Shelterbelt Project’ involved the planting of trees to reduce erosion and provide relief from the biting winds that blew soil from farms and drove people west to California. Now, almost 75 years later, NASA scientists have found that planting trees also can significantly reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Tree planting and insect co

If global warming shuts down the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, the result could be catastrophic climate change. The environmental effects, models indicate, depend upon whether the shutdown is reversible or irreversible.

“If the thermohaline shutdown is irreversible, we would have to work much harder to get it to restart,” said Michael Schlesinger, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a co-author of a re

A new method of measuring emissions from cookstoves could help improve human health and enhance the accuracy of global climate models.

Wood-fueled cooking stoves are commonly used in Central America and other Third World nations. Producing copious amounts of noxious smoke, the stoves can be detrimental to human health. Lack of knowledge about the characteristics and quantities of emissions from millions of these modified campfires is a major contributor to uncertainties in globa

Leading coral reef experts are meeting today, 16 December 2004, at the Zoological Society of London to discuss the alarming rates of decline and formulate an action plan to prevent the demise of these important ecosystems. With approximately 20% of coral reefs already destroyed, it is thought that close to 50% may be close to collapse.

Coral reefs are critically important for the goods and services they provide to millions of people, with a global value estimated at $375 billion

A simple stroll after a full day of field research near a high Andean glacier in Peru led glaciologist Lonnie Thompson to discover a bed of previously hidden plants that date back at least 50,000 years.

And while that discovery is novel enough to please any scientist, it’s the implication that those perfectly preserved plants may suggest that really excites him.

Thompson, a professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University and a world-class glaciologist, has made

Glaciologist Lonnie Thompson worries that he may have found clues that show history repeating itself, and if he is right, the result could have important implications to modern society.

Thompson has spent his career trekking to the far corners of the world to find remote ice fields and then bring back cores drilled from their centers. Within those cores are the records of ancient climate from across the globe. From the mountains of data drawn by analyzing countless ice cores, and

Team discovers large, new class of airborne particles unaccounted for in climate models

Dry dust reacts with air pollutants to form dewy particles whose sunlight-reflecting and cloud-altering properties are unaccounted for in atmospheric models. “Calcite-containing dust particles blow into the air and encounter gaseous nitric acid in polluted air from factories to form an entirely new particle of calcium nitrate,” said Alexander Laskin, a senior research scientist at the Departme

One anticipated component missing from an ice core drilled through a high-mountain, Alaskan ice field may force researchers to rethink the geologic history of that region.

Ohio State University scientists had expected to find a thick layer of volcanic tephra – evidence of a massive historic eruption – near the bottom of core they drilled between Mount Bona and Mount Churchill, both ancient volcanoes, in southeast Alaska’s St. Elias Mountain Range. That tephra layer would provide

A new NASA Internet tool called “Giovanni” allows high school and college students and researchers to access and analyze satellite-derived ocean color data. Ocean color data provides students with information about ocean biology by looking at phytoplankton through changes in the color of the ocean surface.

“Ocean color” refers primarily to the measurement of the green pigment called chlorophyll, which is contained in phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are free-floating plants that are

The Earth is a dynamic entity, and scientists are trying to understand it. Various things in nature grow and shrink, such as ice sheets, glaciers, forests, rivers, clouds and atmospheric pollutants, serving as the pulse of the planet and affecting many people in many walks of life. Scientists using NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) are measuring the height of these dynamic features from space with unprecedented accuracy, providing a new way of understanding our changing

Essential Air

Take a deep breath. On Earth the air is easy to take for granted. It’s everywhere. But if you take a rocket into space the Earth’s atmosphere falls away. Astronauts understand this at an instinctive level. Unlike just about every other career in the world, astronauts must bring their own atmosphere to work. It is this essential nature about the atmosphere that generated such high expectations for NASA’s Aura satellite. Launched in July of 2004, this powerful resear

At 32 degrees Fahrenheit, or 0 Celsius, ice changes to water. This simple, unique fact dominates the climate in Earth’s polar regions. Using satellites to detect changes over time, NASA researchers and NASA-funded university scientists have found that Earth’s ice cover is changing rapidly near its poles. Recent studies point to new evidence of relationships between climate warming, ice changes and sea level rise.

Two researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Green

North Sea fishermen should be allowed to play a greater part in taking care of the marine environment as part of a new strategy to protect the sea’s wildlife and habitats.

European scientists, led by a team at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, have come up with a pioneering North Sea fisheries management plan which recognises the importance of humans and their interaction with the marine environment, or ecosystem.

The scientists, who are funded by the European Union

A University of Colorado at Boulder research team has discovered evidence of microbial activity in a rock glacier high above tree line in the Rocky Mountains, a barren environment previously thought to be devoid of life.

Found in an intermittent stream draining from the glacier, the evidence includes traces of dissolved organic material and high levels of nitrates, said Mark Williams, a fellow at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. The high nitrate levels

Engineers who were studying beach erosion got more than they bargained for recently when they discovered unexpected wave behavior in the water along an east coast shoreline.

The finding could ultimately cause researchers to re-examine ideas about beach erosion and the repair of beaches that are damaged by tropical storms. “It could just be that the physics of the system is a little different than we thought,” said Thomas Lippmann, a research scientist in the Department of Civil and

Ice dams across the deepest gorge on Earth created some of the highest-elevation lakes in history. New research shows the most recent of these lakes, in the Himalaya Mountains of Tibet, broke through its ice barrier somewhere between 600 and 900 AD, causing massive torrents of water to pour through the Himalayas into India.

Geological evidence points to the existence of at least three lakes, and probably four, at various times in history when glacial ice from the Himalayas blocked