Most sighting reports of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena occur in the American West where proximity to public lands, dark skies and military installations afford more opportunities to see strange objects in the air. Understanding environmental context may help identify truly anomalous objects that are a legitimate threat.
Among the vast expanse of Antarctica lies the Thwaites Glacier, the world’s widest glacier measuring about 80 miles on the western edge of the continent.
It has been long assumed that Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats was formed as its ancient namesake lake dried up 13,000 years ago. But new research from the University of Utah has gutted that narrative, determining these crusts did not form until several thousand years after Lake Bonneville disappeared, which could have important implications for managing this feature that has been shrinking for decades to the dismay of the racing community and others who revere the saline pan 100 miles west of Salt Lake City. Relying on radiocarbon analysis of pollen found in salt cores, the study concludes the salt began accumulating between 5,400 and 3,500 years ago, demonstrating how this geological feature is not a permanent fixture on the landscape.
Prof. Dr. Santi Pailoplee, Department of Geology, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, in collaboration with the Faculty of Archaeology, Silpakorn University, discovered a large number of rocks and rock formations on Khao Phanom Rung-Plai Bat, Chaloem Phra Kiat District, Buriram Province, which geologically signify human activity in the past, not natural formation.
A team co-led by Southwest Research Institute found evidence for hydrothermal or metamorphic activity within the icy dwarf planets Eris and Makemake, located in the Kuiper Belt.
Our planet’s lithosphere is broken into several tectonic plates. Their configuration is ever-shifting, as supercontinents are assembled and broken up, and oceans form, grow, and then start to close in what is known as the Wilson cycle.
In a study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, WashU researchers discovered that a common mineral called goethite — an iron-rich mineral that is abundant in soils that cover the Earth — tends to incorporate trace metals into its structure over time, binding the metals in such a way that it locks them out of circulation.
Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) is Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning effort to explain the contrasting histories of Native Americans, Africans and aboriginal Australians vs Europeans and Asians.
Researchers at the Statewide California Earthquake Center, or SCEC, are unraveling the mysteries of earthquakes by using physics-based computational models running on high-performance computing systems at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The team’s findings will provide a better understanding of seismic hazards in the Golden State.
Nearly 400 exceptionally well-preserved fossils dating back 470 million years have been discovered in the south of France by two amateur paleontologists.
Following the arrival of the first farmers in Scandinavia 5,900 years ago, the hunter-gatherer population was wiped out within a few generations, according to a new study from Lund University in Sweden, among others.
Australian geologists have used plate tectonic modelling to determine what most likely caused an extreme ice-age climate in Earth’s history, more than 700 million years ago.
The Seattle fault zone is a network of shallow faults slicing through the lowlands of Puget Sound, threatening to create damaging earthquakes for the more than four million people who live there.
Earth is a stressed planet. As plates move, magma rises, and glaciers melt—just to mention a few scenarios—rocks are subject to varying pressure and compressional and extensional forces.
In the several decades since sea otters began to recolonize their former habitat in Elkhorn Slough, a salt marsh-dominated coastal estuary in central California, remarkable changes have occurred in the landscape.
Connor Bleisch, a graduate research assistant in the College of Science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), has won the 2023 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Michael H. Freilich Data Visualization Competition grand prize. The honoree is being recognized for a data visualization project that places the user in the middle of a first-hand recreation of a raging wildfire in the Sequoia National Park in 2021.
The 37th International Geological Congress (IGC 2024) in August 2024, Busan, Korea, will highlight a growing concern amid urgent threats posed by accelerated climate and environmental changes.
As part of the Ice Memory initiative, researchers analysed ice cores drilled in 2018 and 2020 from the Corbassière glacier at Grand Combin in the canton of Valais. A comparison of the two sets of ice cores published in Nature Geoscience shows: Global warming has made at least this glacier unusable as a climate archive.
Microorganisms were the first forms of life on our planet. The clues are written in 3.5 billion-year-old rocks by geochemical and morphological traces, such as chemical compounds or structures that these organisms left behind.
A new research study unravels key findings about the earliest life forms on Earth. In rock samples from Barberton, Republic of South Africa, the researchers were able to find evidence of an unprecedented diverse biological carbon cycle, established at 3.42 billion years ago.
A research team including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York will head to Peru to study the link between ancient agricultural practices, climate shift and war.
Even if global warming were to stop completely, the volume of ice in the European Alps would fall by 34% by 2050. If the trend observed over the last 20 years continues at the same rate, however, almost half the volume of ice will be lost as has been demonstrated by scientists from the University of Lausanne (UNIL, Switzerland) in a new international study.
Humans store water in huge metal towers and deep concrete reservoirs. But nature’s water storage is much more scenic – the snowpack that tops majestic mountains.
It is common knowledge that humans have a big effect on the world and their natural environment. However, what may be less well-known is that humans can also induce earthquakes.
New research has cracked a vital process in the creation of a unique rock type from the Moon. The discovery explains its signature composition and very presence on the lunar surface at all, unravelling a mystery which has long eluded scientists.
An educational collaboration between the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health (RMCOEH) and the Department of Mining Engineering at the University of Utah will bring an interdisciplinary approach to tackle tough problems in mining safety.
How far microplastics travel in the atmosphere depends crucially on particle shape, according to a recent study by scientists at the University of Vienna and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation in Göttingen: While spherical particles settle quickly, microplastic fibers might travel as far as the stratosphere.
Palm Springs Downtown Park is an inviting 1.5-acre urban oasis for residents and visitors to Palm Springs, a design-forward desert destination nestled along the base of the San Jacinto Mountains along the southwestern boundary of the Coachella Valley in California’s Sonoran Desert of the USA.
Major cities on the U.S. Atlantic coast are sinking, in some cases as much as 5 millimeters per year – a decline at the ocean’s edge that well outpaces global sea level rise, confirms new research from Virginia Tech and the U.S. Geological Survey. Particularly hard hit population centers such as New York City and Long Island, Baltimore, and Virginia Beach and Norfolk are seeing areas of rapid “subsidence,” or sinking land, alongside more slowly sinking or relatively stable ground, increasing the risk to roadways, runways, building foundations, rail lines, and pipelines, according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.
With the rise in machine learning applications and artificial intelligence, it's no wonder that more and more scientists and researchers are turning to supercomputers. Supercomputers are commonly used for making predictions with advanced modeling and simulations. This can be applied to climate research, weather forecasting, genomic sequencing, space exploration, aviation engineering and more.
Can a volcano erupt after tens of thousands of years of dormancy? If so, how can this be explained and what makes volcanic eruptions more dangerous, i.e. explosive? These are key questions in volcanic hazard assessment and can also draw attention to volcanoes that appear to be inactive.
When it comes to greenhouse gases, methane is one the biggest contributors. Not only is it massively abundant — it’s about 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
A new study has identified a potentially growing natural hazard in the North: frostquakes. With climate change contributing to many observed changes in weather extremes, such as heavy precipitation and cold waves, these seismic events could become more common. Researchers were surprised by the role of wetlands and drainage channels in irrigated wetlands in origin of frostquakes.
Fairy circles, a nearly hexagonal pattern of bare-soil circular gaps in grasslands, initially observed in Namibia and later in other parts of the world, have fascinated and baffled scientists for years. Theories for their appearance range from spatial self-organization induced by scale-dependent water-vegetation feedback to pre-existing patterns of termite nests.
Record breaking marine heatwaves will cause devastating mass coral bleaching worldwide in the next few years, according to a University of Queensland coral reef scientist.
Paleontologists are getting a glimpse at life over a billion years in the past based on chemical traces in ancient rocks and the genetics of living animals.
Researchers have discovered magnetic monopoles – isolated magnetic charges – in a material closely related to rust, a result that could be used to power greener and faster computing technologies.
Scientists from Stockholm University have investigated the mechanisms that create cool microclimates beneath forest canopies during warm and dry summer days. The study reveals how canopy shading and water evaporation together create cooler forest microclimates compared to temperatures outside forests.
A recent study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth sheds new light on the formation of the East Coast of the United States – a “passive margin,” in geologic terms – during the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea and the opening of the Atlantic Ocean around 230 million years ago.
Atmospheric scientists at UAlbany and China’s Jiangsu Meteorological Observatory recently co-published a new paper in AGU’s Geophysical Research Letters that finds unstable atmospheric conditions have significantly increased over the last several decades.