Search Results for: Ocean

One of the more controversial environmental issues, which emerged in the final years of the Soviet era, was the plan to dam and reverse the flow of north-flowing rivers in order to irrigate the dry southern steppes. This scheme was roundly criticised by scientists and environmentalists at the time because of fears for the impact on the Arctic Ocean and global climate. It now appears that nature performed this experiment some 90,000 years ago.

This months issue of the Journal of Quaternary

Knitted pullovers protect penguins from oil discharge

Knitters around the world have pulled together to save thousands of oil-soaked little penguins on Phillip Island, southern Australia.

Ten thousand penguin-sized, pure-wool jumpers have flooded into the offices of the Tasmanian Conservation Trust in response to their call for emergency insulation for a vulnerable population of world’s smallest penguins – sometimes known as fairy penguins.

In mid-December 2001 a cru

Argon traces keep tabs on climate change.

A new method for detecting tiny quantities of a rare form of the element argon may help oceanographers to trace the vast undersea currents that regulate our planet’s climate.

The technique can pick out one atom of the rare isotope argon-39 (39Ar) amid 10 million billion other atoms. That’s equivalent to detecting less than a litre of water in America’s 300-mile Lake Michigan.

Philippe Collon, a nuclear physicist at the Lamon

Researchers name the microbes that could produce power by munching pollution.

Bacteria could clear up oil spills and generate electricity at the same time. US scientists have identified microbes that produce power as they digest organic waste 1 .

The bacteria strip electrons from carbon in ocean sediments to convert it into the carbon dioxide they need for metabolism and growth. Usually the organisms just dump the electrons onto iron or sulphate minerals on

Natural randomness punctuated past ice ages with warm spells.

Natural randomness in the world’s climate system may have caused the frequent, fast and fleeting returns to warm conditions during past ice ages, say two German scientists 1 .

Andrey Ganopolski and Stefan Rahmstorf at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research think that the flickering character of ice-age climate is a signature of stochastic resonance. This is the counter-intuitive phenome

The 2001 calendar year was slightly warmer than “average,” according to global climate data gathered by instruments aboard NOAA satellites.

The composite global temperature for 2001 was 0.06 degrees C (about 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the 20-year (1979-to-1998) average, said Dr. John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

Compared to other years, 2001 was the ninth warmes