An earthquake shook the South-West Pacific islands of Ambrym and Pentecost on 26 November 1999. It was the strongest thrust event ever recorded in central Vanuatu. Offshore and onshore data gathered by IRD researchers yielded clues as to the tectonic movements involved in the earthquake. A resulting model of the rupture mechanism showed that in this area of Vanuatu, slipping motions of the Australian oceanic plate under the Pacific plate are blocked to the West, which generates strong stresses to the

Small ant invaders put plants at peril

Not surprisingly, tiny ants just can’t tote seeds as far as their bigger cousins.

Because seeds are more likely to survive and sprout if they’re farther from the mother plant, it’s best for plants to form seed-moving partnerships with heftier ants.

Now ecologists have shown how much poorer small ants are at moving seeds.

The research suggests that plants that depend on ants for heavy lifting may be in

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the tens of millions of marine birds living in the “Bird Islands of Peru” became famous around the world. This was due to their appeal as a visual spectacle and because they became economically important as high producers of guano, droppings that the country mined and exported around the world for fertilizer.

A new study published in the current issue of the journal Fisheries Oceanography says the populations of these famous birds have declined dra

Erosion of genetic diversity of crop plants has for several decades been making it necessary to develop initiatives for protecting these plant resources. One strategy is in-situ conservation of crop plants. The model currently advanced involves maintaining the varieties to be conserved isolated in reserves, protected from entry of other varieties from elsewhere and cultivated according to ancestral farming practices. Researchers from the IRD and the CIMMYT of Mexico (1) used work previously conducted

Irrigation by surge flooding, a technique used essentially in rice cropping, involves the input of large volumes of water. In some regions, this water does not infiltrate to any depth. Poor infiltration like this can cause severe loss in soil quality and harm crops. Recent investigations on such a situation in a rice field in the River Senegal valley, involving water budget monitoring for 100 days, the length of a cropping season, have confirmed a lack of water infiltration below 40 cm depth. Scienti

The first solid evidence of human use of fire in Eurasia as early as 790,000 years ago has been found in excavations in Israel conducted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Institute of Archaeology.

The discovery was made in excavations, which have been conducted over seven seasons, at the Benot Ya’aqov bridge site along the Dead Sea rift in the Hula Valley of northern Israel. According to Prof. Naama Goren-Inbar, head of the Institute of Archaeology and director of the Benot Ya’aqov exc

“Regime shifts” are infrequent, large changes in oceanic conditions that spread through the food web. Depending on dynamics of the ecosystem, the response of a biological organism to some external forcing can be smooth, abrupt, or discontinuous.

In a paper published in the current issue of Progress in Oceanography, Dr. Jeremy Collie, University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography, Dr. Katherine Richardson, University of Arhus, Denmark, and Dr. John Steele, Woods Hole Oceanograph

The use of laser technology to provide new insights into animal behaviour could lead to improved livestock management practices, according to the leader of a Rockhampton-based CSIRO Livestock Industries research group, Dr Dave Swain.

In a recent trial, Livestock and Environment Group researchers used a survey laser to monitor and record the movement of cows and calves around a paddock.

“The laser allowed us to track the animals without physically handling them, so we didn’t di

Scientists at the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, Ala., are using information gleaned from NASA satellites, aircraft and field research to better understand dynamics behind tornadoes, lightning, hurricanes and other destructive forces of nature.

“A better understanding of severe weather can help people year-round,” said Dr. Tim Miller of the Global Hydrology and Climate Center (GHCC) in Huntsville. “The Center is conducting a variety of unique research pr

The ornate map, seemingly crude by today’s standards, depicts sea monsters off the coast of Scotland, sinking galleons, sea snakes, and wolves urinating against trees.

When oceanographers from Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the University of Rhode Island compared a large group of swirls, shown on the chart off the east coast of Iceland, with thermal images from an Earth observation satellite they found the swirls corresponded almost perfectly with the Iceland-Faroes Front – where the Gulf

NASA scientists have found that cirrus clouds, formed by contrails from aircraft engine exhaust, are capable of increasing average surface temperatures enough to account for a warming trend in the United States that occurred between 1975 and 1994.

“This result shows the increased cirrus coverage, attributable to air traffic, could account for nearly all of the warming observed over the United States for nearly 20 years starting in 1975, but it is important to acknowledge contrails would ad

Among the most accomplished navigators in the animal kingdom, sea turtles often migrate across thousands of miles of open ocean to arrive at specific feeding and nesting sites. How they do so, however, has mystified biologists for over a century.

Now, new findings by a research team headed by Drs. Kenneth and Catherine Lohmann, marine biologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, indicate that the navigational ability of sea turtles is based at least partly on a “magnetic ma

The fish farming industry can be one of the most important sources of value creation in Norway’s future. “The long-term view that steers knowledge development can give Norwegian fish farming the same important role that oil has had,” says Harald Sveier, Senior Reseacher in EWOS Innovation.

Senior Researcher Harald Sveier of EWS Innovation has recently, together with 30-some other industry actors, worked out a scenario for Norwegian fish farming. The work takes place in the fish farming progr

Shipboard marine scientists from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, will release a nontoxic red dye into the Atlantic Ocean off New Jersey during the week of May 2 to help reveal the contents and fate of Hudson River water after it joins the Atlantic.
The dye release is the first of three experiments in Rutgers’ ongoing study of the Hudson River Plume – the mix of river water and substances that flow into the ocean at a rate of 500 billion gallons per day. Preliminary studies indi

Representatives from 47 countries and more than two dozen international organisations met in Tokyo last week, coming a significant step closer to achieving the goal of an integrated Earth monitoring network.

The Japanese capital was the location of the fourth Group on Earth Observations (GEO) summit. GEO is an intergovernmental working group charged with developing a plan for a co-ordinated global Earth Observation network providing data on environmental factors for both scientific and human

The National Center for Atmospheric Research will fly a C-130 research aircraft over Colorado’s Front Range this May and July to measure how much carbon dioxide mountain forests remove from the air as spring turns into summer. NCAR scientists and their university colleagues are developing new methods for assessing carbon uptake over complex terrain on regional scales. Accurate assessments could help show to what extent carbon dioxide storage in Western mountain forests– a potentially important “sink