The September 2012 record low in Arctic sea-ice extent was big news, but a missing piece of the puzzle was lurking below the ocean's surface. What volume of ice floats on Arctic waters? And how does that compare to previous summers? These are difficult but important questions, because how much ice actually remains suggests how vulnerable the ice pack will be to more warming.
Earth
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Many animals prefer food — snails, nuts, etc. — that must be cracked and crushed. Scientists have measured the maximum force of their impressive bites before, but a new study introduces a significant subtlety: bite force depends not only on the size and strength of the eater, but also the size of the eatee. That insight has important implications in the lives of predators and prey.
Management and restoration of the Mississippi River deltaic plain (southern United States) and associated wetlands require a quantitative understanding of sediment delivery during large flood events, past and present.
Nicole S. Khan and colleagues investigate the sedimentary fingerprint of the 2011 Mississippi River flood across the Louisiana coast (Atchafalaya Delta, Terrebonne, Barataria, and Mississippi River Delta basins) to assess spatial patterns of sedimentation and to identify key indicators of sediment provenance.
Emissions from coal power stations could be drastically reduced by a new, energy-efficient material that adsorbs large amounts of carbon dioxide, then releases it when exposed to sunlight.
In a study published today in Angewandte Chemie, Monash University and CSIRO scientists for the first time discovered a photosensitive metal organic framework (MOF) - a class of materials known for their exceptional capacity to store gases. This has created a powerful and cost-effective new tool to capture and store, or potentially recycle, carbon dioxide.
ANN ARBOR — Ancient carbon trapped in Arctic permafrost is extremely sensitive to sunlight and, if exposed to the surface when long-frozen soils melt and collapse, can release climate-warming carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere much faster than previously thought.
University of Michigan ecologist and aquatic biogeochemist George Kling and his colleagues studied places in Arctic Alaska where permafrost is melting and is causing the overlying land surface to collapse, forming erosional holes and landslides and exposing long-buried soils to sunlight.
Volcanoes are well known for cooling the climate. But just how much and when has been a bone of contention among historians, glaciologists and archeologists. Now a team of atmosphere chemists, from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the University of Copenhagen, has come up with a way to say for sure which historic episodes of global cooling were caused by volcanic eruptions.
Boulder, Colo., USA – New Geosphere articles posted online 11 Jan. and 5 Feb. 2013 include additions to the "Origin and Evolution of the Sierra Nevada and Walker Lane" series, the "Neogene Tectonics and Climate-Tectonic Interactions in the Southern Alaskan Orogen" series, and the "Crevolution 2: Origin and Evolution of the Colorado River System II" series. A new series is also introduced: "Results of IODP Exp313: The History and Impact of Sea-level Change Offshore New Jersey."
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Increasingly frequent extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, severe storms, and heat waves have focused the attention of climate scientists on the connections between greenhouse warming and extreme weather. Because of the potential threat to U.S. national security, a new study was conducted to explore the forces driving extreme weather events and their impacts over the next decade, specifically with regard to their implications for national security planning.
EUGENE, Ore. (Feb. 11, 2013) -- A study of the Umpqua River basin in the Oregon Coast Range helps explain natural processes behind the width of valleys and provides potentially useful details for river restoration efforts designed to improve habitats for coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch).
Researchers from the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), in collaboration with the CSIC and Macquarie University in Australia, have developed a new technique, similar to the MRI but with a much higher resolution and sensitivity, which has the ability to scan individual cells. In an article published in Nature Nanotech, and highlighted by Nature, ICFO Prof. Romain Quidant explains how this was accomplished using artificial atoms, diamond nanoparticles doped with nitrogen impurity, to probe very weak magnetic fields such as those generated in some biological molecules.
Washington, DC—A team of scientists, led by researchers at Carnegie's Department of Global Ecology, has determined that the recent widespread die-off of Colorado trembling aspen trees is a direct result of decreased precipitation exacerbated by high summer temperatures. The die-off, triggered by the drought from 2000-2003, is estimated to have affected up to 17% of Colorado aspen forests. In 2002, the drought subjected the trees to the most extreme growing season water stress of the past century.
Explosive cyclones, which have rapidly intensifying winds and heavy rain, can seriously threaten life and property.
These "meteorological bombs" are difficult to forecast, in part because scientists need a better understanding of the physical mechanisms by which they form.
In particular, the large-scale circulation conditions that may contribute to explosive cyclone formation are not well understood.
Black and Pezza analyzed broad-environment energetics in creating a global climatology of explosive cyclones.
Matter wave interferometry has a long standing tradition at the University of Vienna, where the first quantum interference of large molecules has already been observed in 1999. Nowadays scientists are hunting down evidence for the quantum mechanical behavior of increasingly complex constituents of matter. This is done in experiments in which the flying of each particle seems to obtain information about distinct places in space, which are inaccessible according to classical physics.
Synchronised laser flashes for quantum interferometry
When talking about lightning, appearances of different lightning which occur along with thunderstorms will emerge in the minds of the people and these lightning occur in the troposphere. However, in addition to lightning in the troposphere, there are kinds of lightning discharges which occur above the thunderstorms. Up to now, lightning discharges above storms include sprite, elves (Emissions of Light and VLF perturbation due to EMP Sources, elves), Blue jet and Gigantic jet etc, and all of these discharges are totally named as Transient Luminous Events (TLEs).
Albert Einstein called quantum entanglement—two particles in different locations, even on other sides of the universe, influencing each other—"spooky action at a distance."
Einstein made the comment while criticizing quantum mechanics as incomplete—the phenomenon of quantum entanglement seems to be at odds with Einstein's theory of relativity.