Earth | Page 889 | Science Codex

Global map to predict giant earthquakes

A team of international researchers, led by Monash University's Associate Professor Wouter Schellart, have developed a new global map of subduction zones, illustrating which ones are predicted to be capable of generating giant earthquakes and which ones are not.

The new research, published in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, comes nine years after the giant earthquake and tsunami in Sumatra in December 2004, which devastated the region and many other areas surrounding the Indian Ocean, and killed more than 200,000 people.

First test to predict acute mountain sickness

Istanbul, Turkey – 12 December 2013: The first test to identify acute mountain sickness has been developed by a team of researchers in Italy and France and is presented today at EuroEcho-Imaging 2013. The test could revolutionise trekking and climbing by predicting who will develop the potentially deadly condition so they can avoid high altitudes, ascend more gradually or take preventative medication.

NASA reveals new results from inside the ozone hole

NASA scientists have revealed the inner workings of the ozone hole that forms annually over Antarctica and found that declining chlorine in the stratosphere has not yet caused a recovery of the ozone hole.

Upper Rio Grande impact assessment reveals potential growing gap in water supply and demand

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Increasing temperatures and changes in the timing of snowmelt runoff could impact the amount of water available on the upper Rio Grande in the future. These are some of the results of the Upper Rio Grande Impact Assessment released by Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Anne Castle.

IU-designed probe opens new path for drug development against leading STD

Biochemical sleuthing by an Indiana University graduate student has ended a nearly 50-year-old search to find a megamolecule in bacterial cell walls commonly used as a target for antibiotics, but whose presence had never been identified in the bacterium responsible for the most commonly reported sexually transmitted disease in the United States.

Alpine glacier, unchanged for thousands of years, now melting

SAN FRANCISCO—Less than 20 miles from the site where melting ice exposed the 5,000-year-old body of Ötzi the Iceman, scientists have discovered new and compelling evidence that the Italian Alps are warming at an unprecedented rate.

Part of that evidence comes in the form of a single dried-out leaf from a larch tree that grew thousands of years ago.

Arctic cyclones more common than previously thought

SAN FRANCISCO—From 2000 to 2010, about 1,900 cyclones churned across the top of the world each year, leaving warm water and air in their wakes—and melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.

That's about 40 percent more than previously thought, according to a new analysis of these Arctic storms.

A 40 percent difference in the number of cyclones could be important to anyone who lives north of 55 degrees latitude—the area of the study, which includes the northern reaches of Canada, Scandinavia and Russia, along with the state of Alaska.

UNL-led team finds less is more with adding graphene to nanofibers

Lincoln, Neb., Dec. 11, 2103 -- Figuring that if some is good, more must be better, researchers have been trying to pack more graphene, a supermaterial, into structural composites. Collaborative research led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln materials engineers discovered that, in this case, less is more.

Negative resistivity leads to positive resistance in the presence of a magnetic field

In a paper appearing in Nature's Scientific Reports, Dr. Ramesh Mani, professor of physics and astronomy at Georgia State University, reports that, in the presence of a magnetic field, negative resistivity can produce a positive resistance, along with a sign reversal in the Hall effect, in GaAs/AlGaAs semiconductor devices.

Study uncovers new evidence for assessing tsunami risk from very large volcanic island landslides

The risk posed by tsunami waves generated by Canary Island landslides may need to be re-evaluated, according to researchers at the National Oceanography Centre. Their findings suggest that these landslides result in smaller tsunami waves than previously thought by some authors, because of the processes involved.

Supervolcanoes discovered in Utah

Brigham Young University geologists found evidence of some of the largest volcanic eruptions in earth's history right in their own backyard.

These supervolcanoes aren't active today, but 30 million years ago more than 5,500 cubic kilometers of magma erupted during a one-week period near a place called Wah Wah Springs. By comparison, this eruption was about 5,000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.

Volatile ecosystems, a natural wind tunnel, volcanic lightning, and stress & strain on Venus

Boulder, Colo., USA – New Geology articles posted online ahead of print on 6 Dec. cover fossil estuarine fauna from the Austrian Miocene; a "natural wind tunnel" experiment on the Chinese Loess Plateau; frictional melting of a microgabbro in water; glacial moraines in Colorado; new topographic data from Venus; solving a major issue concerning melt extraction from Earth's mantle; and experimentally generated volcanic lightning.

Runaway process drives intermediate-depth earthquakes, Stanford scientists find

Stanford scientists may have solved the mystery of what drives a type of earthquake that occurs deep within the Earth and accounts for one in four quakes worldwide.

Known as intermediate-depth earthquakes, these temblors originate farther down inside the Earth than shallow earthquakes, which take place in the uppermost layer of the Earth's surface, called the crust. The kinds of quakes that afflict California and most other places in the world are shallow earthquakes.

Post-Sandy, Long Island barrier systems appear surprisingly sound

"The shape of the bedforms that make up the barrier system did not change a whole lot," said co-Principal Investigator (PI) John Goff of the Institute for Geophysics. "Where we might have expected to see significant erosion based on long-term history, not a lot happened — nothing that ate into the shoreface."

"The sand largely took the blow," added co-PI Jamie Austin of the Institute for Geophysics. "Like a good barricade, the barrier system absorbed the significant blow, but held."

Harvard study shows sprawl threatens water quality, climate protection, and land conservation gains

A groundbreaking study by Harvard University's Harvard Forest and the Smithsonian Institution reveals that, if left unchecked, recent trends in the loss of forests to development will undermine significant land conservation gains in Massachusetts, jeopardize water quality, and limit the natural landscape's ability to protect against climate change.