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Earth Sciences Related Articles

Pollution teams with thunderclouds to warm atmosphere - (DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) Pollution is warming the atmosphere through summer thunderstorm clouds, according to a computational study published May 10 in Geophysical Research Letters. How much the warming effect of these clouds offsets the cooling that other clouds provide is not yet clear. To find out, researchers need to incorporate this new-found warming into global climate models....

May GSA Bulletin postings take global geology tour - (Geological Society of America) GSA Bulletin papers posted online 3-18 May 2012 cover a variety of locations: the Coast Range basalt province, southwest Washington State, USA; the Faroe Islands of the northeast Atlantic margin; Wairarapa fault, North Island, New Zealand; the eastern Mediterranean Sea offshore of southern Crete; the southern central Andes of Argentina; the Adriatic Carbonate Platform of southwest Slovenia; the Atacama Desert, Chile; Questa caldera, northern New Mexico, USA; the Norwegian Caledonides; and Lake Tahoe, USA....

Stanford scientists document fragile land-sea ecological chain - (Stanford University) Intricate, often invisible chains of life are threatened with extinction around the world. A new study quantifies one of the longest such chains ever documented....

Finding fingerprints in sea level rise - (Harvard University) As described in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, graduate students Eric Morrow and Carling Hay demonstrate the use of a statistical tool called a Kalman smoother to identify "sea level fingerprints" -- tell-tale variations in sea level rise -- in a synthetic data set. Using those fingerprints, scientists can determine where glacial melting is occurring....

DNA barcoding verified the discovery of a highly disconnected crane fly species - (Pensoft Publishers) Finnish and Russian entomologists have discovered a new crane fly species on the Eurasian continent. The new species, Tipula recondita, has been documented in both Finnish Lapland and the Russian Far East in two apparently disconnected populations. The description was published in the open-access journal ZooKeys....

Geosphere introduces a new special issue theme - (Geological Society of America) Geosphere articles posted May 17 include an introduction to the new theme; a multifaceted study of the formation and transport of ancient oceanic rocks now found in southeastern Yukon, Canada; a new technique to help find the initial age of a multiply reactivated fault; and bathymetry studies of unusual flat-topped seafloor mounds beneath the Ross Sea that the authors believe are of volcanic origin, erupted during a geomagnetic reversal and under a grounded ice sheet....

Visualizing the imprints of past and present Earth dynamics - (Geological Society of America) New Lithosphere articles posted online May 16, 2012, report on (1) seismic anisotropy measured beneath 14 broadband stations in southeastern India; why geoscientists should persist in their efforts to reach and study such spectacular sub-sea geologic features as the Mariana Trench (recently explored by film director James Cameron) and how "land geologists" can help this effort by studying on-land equivalents like ophiolites; and (3) pressures and melting temperatures of sediments deeply buried in Earth's mantle....

UF researchers name new extinct giant turtle found near world's largest snake - (University of Florida) University of Florida researchers have described a new extinct giant turtle species from the same Colombian mine where they discovered Titanoboa -- and one of the only animals the world's largest snake could not have eaten....

Climate engineering report ranked among top government priorities by Copenhagen Consensus Center - (University of Texas at Austin) The effect of global warming could potentially be ameliorated by engineering ways to reflect more sunlight back into space, according to a report by a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.The report, by Professor J. Eric Bickel and Hudson Institute Fellow Lee Lane, was selected by a panel of international experts as one of 16 areas of research that governments and philanthropists should prioritize to respond to the world's most pressing challenges....

Germany's energy transition: 1 year later - (German Center for Research and Innovation) After the Fukushima nuclear explosions, Germany responded to the heightened international focus on energy procurement by returning to a fast-paced nuclear phase-out program. On May 21, a lunch discussion at the German Center for Research and Innovation will address the mechanisms for achieving these goals and describe plans for assessing the program's success....

Ancient giant turtle fossil revealed - (North Carolina State University) Picture a turtle the size of a Smart car, with a shell large enough to double as a kiddie pool....

Could cap and trade for water solve problems facing the United States' largest rivers? - (Wiley-Blackwell) Lake Mead, on the Colorado River, is the largest reservoir in the United States, but users are consuming more water than flows down the river in an average year, which threatens the water supply for agriculture and households. To solve this imbalance scientists are proposing a Cap and Trade system of interstate water trading. The proposal, published in Journal of the American Water Resources Association, builds on the success of such an initiative in Australia....

Bay Area PV Consortium announces $7.5 million in grants to lower the cost of large-scale solar - (Stanford University) The Bay Area Photovoltaic Consortium -- an industry-supported program led by Stanford University and the University of California-Berkeley -- has announced its first research grants aimed at making utility-scale solar power cost-competitive by the end of the decade....

Abundance of rare DNA changes following population explosion may hold clues to common diseases - (University of Washington) Scientists have taken a first step toward understanding how rare genetic differences among people contribute to leading chronic illnesses. One-letter DNA code changes occur frequently in human genomes, but each variant is usually found in only a few individuals. This phenomenon is consistent with the population explosion of the past 5,000 years. Studying the evolution of rare genetic variants and their health impact is critical as low cost, rapid sequencing enters clinical use. Such information would help doctors interpret personal genomes....

In chemical reactions, water adds speed without heat - (University of Wisconsin-Madison) An international team of researchers has discovered how adding trace amounts of water can tremendously speed up chemical reactions -- such as hydrogenation and hydrogenolysis -- in which hydrogen is one of the reactants, or starting materials....

We can learn a lot from other species - (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics) Researchers at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute have confirmed the long-held belief that studying the genes we share with other animals is useful. The study, published today in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, shows how bioinformatics makes it possible to test the fundamental principles on which life science is built....

Resolving the ortholog conjecture - (Public Library of Science) Researchers at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute have confirmed the long-held conjecture that studying the genes we share with other animals is a viable means of extrapolating information about human biology....

1,000 years of climate data confirms Australia's warming - (University of Melbourne) In the first study of its kind in Australasia, scientists have used 27 natural climate records to create the first large-scale temperature reconstruction for the region over the last 1,000 years....

Heliconius butterfly genome explains wing pattern diversity - (Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute) Pooling funds and putting their heads together, more than 70 scientists from 9 institutions including the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, sequenced the entire genome of the butterfly genus Heliconius, a brightly colored favorite of collectors and scientists since the Victorian era. Their results are published in the prestigious journal, Nature....

WPI research team to conduct tests aimed at better understanding post-earthquake fires - (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) A team of researchers from the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) will conduct groundbreaking fire tests May 23-25 aimed at better understanding the effects of earthquakes on building systems designed to suppress or prevent the spread of fires. The tests, part of a $5 million, multi-institution study, will be conducted in a five-story building constructed atop the nation's largest outdoor shake table, located at the University of California, San Diego....

New advice on medication disposal: Trash beats take-back, new study suggests - (University of Michigan) Returning extra medicine to the pharmacy for disposal might not be worth the extra time, money or greenhouse gas emissions, according to a University of Michigan study that is the first to look at the net effects of so-called take-back programs....

Online application and tools expand access to critical data for assessing water availability - (Bureau of Reclamation) A new online tool for western water managers and the public to help increase accessibility of science-based information and understanding of how climate variations will impact the availability of water to communities is now available. Projected streamflow data can be found at the Bureau of Reclamation's new website on Streamflow Projections for the Western United States. The site provides an interface to data for 195 sites on streams and rivers throughout the West....

Sumatra faces yet another risk -- major volcanic eruptions - (Oregon State University) The early April earthquake of magnitude 8.6 that shook Sumatra was a grim reminder of the devastating earthquakes and tsunami that killed tens of thousands of people in 2004 and 2005. Now a new study, funded by the National Science Foundation, shows that the residents of that region are at risk from yet another potentially deadly natural phenomenon -- major volcanic eruptions....

USGS details effects of climate change on water availability in 14 local basins nationwide - (United States Geological Survey) New USGS modeling studies project changes in water availability due to climate change at the local level. So far, the USGS has applied these models to 14 basins....

Geoscience Currents 59 quantifies students' attitudes toward pursuing geoscience - (American Geological Institute) In continuation of the Geoscience Academic Provenance research series conducted by Houlton, Geoscience Currents 59 presents quantitative data collected from participants through a Likert-based survey. Participants were asked to rate their feelings toward geoscience on a scale from 1 to 7. The aggregated responses illuminated the changes over time in the students' attitudes toward pursuing geoscience....