COLUMBIA, Mo. –Even though the Cretaceous Period ended more than 65 million years ago, clues remain about how the ocean water circulated at that time. Measuring a chemical tracer in samples of ancient fish scales, bones and teeth, University of Missouri and University of Florida researchers have studied circulation in the Late Cretaceous North Atlantic Ocean. The Late Cretaceous was a time with high atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and warm temperatures. Understanding such ancient greenhouse climates is important for predicting what may happen in the future.
Earth
How best to map 'boreal' or northern forest with spaceborne radar is the focus of an ESA campaign currently underway in northern Sweden. By answering this question, the campaign addresses one of the key objectives of the candidate Earth Explorer BIOMASS mission.
MADISON, WI, October 20, 2008 | Union County New Mexico is a landscape of striking diversity. Out of expansive rangelands rise sporadic yet majestic cinder cone volcanoes and mesas preserved by basalt, part of the Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field. Capulin volcano, formed approximately 62,000 years ago, is the youngest volcano in the field. The cone rises 396 m from the plain, reaching an altitude of 2,495 m above sea level. The base of the volcano is 6.4 km in circumference, and the crater is 126 m deep and 442 m across.
Bremerhaven, October 17th 2008. The German research vessel Polarstern has returned today to Bremerhaven from the Arctic Sea. It has cruised as the first research vessel ever both the Northeast and the Northwest Passages and thereby circled the North Pole. The third part of the research vessel's 23rd Arctic expedition, operated by the Alfred Wegener Institute in the Helmholtz Association, started its journey on August 12th in Reykjavik and ended it on October 17th in Bremerhaven. The ship travelled a distance of 10.800 nautical miles, equivalent to 20.000 kilometres.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) World Conservation Congress this week adopted a resolution urging nations to protect the leatherback sea turtle and sharks from the world's industrial fisheries by identifying and creating marine protected areas along the Pacific leatherback's migratory routes.
The Head of Geography at the University of Leicester has addressed an international conference in Brazil on the use of modern radar technology for monitoring the rainforests.
Professor Heiko Balzter told 200 scientists and foresters in Brazil "We need advanced radar satellites for monitoring tropical deforestation and forest biomass".
The researchers from South America, the US, Canada and Europe had come together for the 8th Seminar on Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems Applications in Forest Engineering in the city of Curitiba, Brazil.
GREENBELT, Md. - Lightning and gases from volcanic eruptions could have given rise to the first life on Earth, according to a new analysis of samples from a classic origin-of-life experiment by NASA and university researchers. The NASA-funded result is the subject of a paper in Science appearing October 16.
For decades, scientists and resource managers have known that wildfires affect forest soils, evidenced, in part, by the erosion that often occurs after a fire kills vegetation and disrupts soil structure. But, the lack of detailed knowledge of forest soils before they are burned by wildfire has hampered efforts to understand fire's effects on soil fertility and forest ecology.
A unique, patent-pending collection of microbes that can be used both for cleaning up the environment and addressing our energy needs has earned the U.S. Department of Energy's Savannah River National Laboratory kudos from a newsletter covering the rapidly expanding field of nanotechnology.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Physicists working to disprove "Lorentz invariance" -- Einstein's prediction that matter and massless particles will behave the same no matter how they're turned or how fast they go -- won't get that satisfaction from muon neutrinos, at least for the time being, says a consortium of scientists.
WALNUT CREEK, Calif.— Diatoms, mighty microscopic algae, have profound influence on climate, producing 20 percent of the oxygen we breathe by capturing atmospheric carbon and in so doing, countering the greenhouse effect. Since their evolutionary origins these photosynthetic wonders have come to acquire advantageous genes from bacterial, animal and plant ancestors enabling them to thrive in today's oceans.
A U.S.-led, multinational team of scientists this month will investigate one of the Earth's last major unexplored places, using sophisticated airborne radar and ground-based seismologic tools to virtually peel away more than 2.5 miles of ice covering an Antarctic mountain range that rivals the Alps in elevation.
WASHINGTON -- Radical changes to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's stormwater program are necessary to reverse degradation of fresh water resources and ensure progress toward the Clean Water Act's goal of "fishable and swimmable" waters, says a new report from the National Research Council. Increased water volume and pollutants from stormwater have degraded water quality and habitats in virtually every urban stream system.
A U.S.-led, multinational team of scientists from six nations will pierce the mysteries of one of the globe's last major unexplored places this month. Using sophisticated airborne radar and other Information Age tools and techniques, the scientists will virtually "peel away" more than four kilometers (2.5 miles) of ice covering an Antarctic mountain range that rivals the Alps in elevation, and which current scientific knowledge suggests shouldn't be there at all.
SANTA CRUZ, CA--Along the southern coast of Baja California, Mexico, scientists have been counting the carcasses of endangered sea turtles for a decade as part of an effort to assess and eliminate threats to loggerhead sea turtle populations. Their findings, published this week, are shocking: almost 3,000 sea turtles were found dead along a 27-mile stretch of coast during a five-year period from 2003 to 2007.