Researchers at the University of Notre Dame found that the complexity of a uranium-based mineral, dubbed ewingite, is nearly twice as high as the previous most complex mineral.
High in Mongolia's Gobi Desert, the climate is so dry and cold that glaciers shrank during the last ice age. Dating of rock deposits shows how glaciers in this less-studied region can behave very differently as the climate shifts.
Historically mapping the amount of water content in soil is essential to determine whether crops will flourish, wildfires will ignite or floods will destroy the land. Employing deep learning technology to existing soil moisture data can help accurately predict these moisture changes over time, according to a team of Penn State researchers.
A new study led by Boise State associate professor of geophysics Jeffrey Johnson has proven the potential for using volcanic infrasound – inaudible sounds produced by active volcanoes – to help forecast future catastrophic eruptions.
Ugeographers sought to understand the factors fueling hate across space. Their findings paint a rather grim reality of America; hate is a national phenomenon, and more complicated than they imagined. The researchers mapped the patterns of active hate groups in every U.S. county in the year 2014, and analyzed their potential socioeconomic and ideological drivers.
In the next 30 years, there is a one-in-three chance that the Hayward fault will rupture with a 6.7 magnitude or higher earthquake, according to the United States Geologic Survey (USGS). Such an earthquake will cause widespread damage to structures, transportation and utilities, as well as economic and social disruption in the East Bay.
A research team at Case Western Reserve is asking an important question about the self-evident paradox standing in the way of our generally accepted theory of how the Earth's inner core formed. The "inner core nucleation paradox" suggests that there is now satisfactory solution to account for the existence of a solid inner core. So, now what?
A study led by University of Colorado Boulder researchers provides new insight into the Moon's excessive equatorial bulge, a feature that solidified in place over four billion years ago as the Moon gradually distanced itself from the Earth.
A huge increase in the number of man-made earthquakes in Oklahoma, USA, is strongly linked to the depth at which wastewater from the oil and gas industry is injected into the ground, according to a new study involving the University of Southampton.
Plants and animals are generally thought to colonize from continents to islands, over time leading to the evolution of separate island species. But a new study published in the Journal of Biogeography suggests a re-thinking of colonizing patterns.
About 13 million years ago, a distant ancestor of modern apes and humans suffered an untimely death on the arid landscape of northern Kenya. Last year, a Rutgers scientist helped bring its tiny skull to light, filling in a huge gap in the evolutionary record. And on Saturday, members of the public are invited to come face-to-skull with that ancestor, known as “Alesi,” at the Rutgers Geology Museum’s 50th annual Open House event. The museum stands on the College Avenue Campus of Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Admission is free.
Tropical forests span a huge area, harbor a wide diversity of species, and are important to water and nutrient cycling. Researchers used high-tech tools to more precisely view where these cleared sites were and the lasting impact they had on the rainforest in the South American Amazon Basin.
Danny Bowman, a Sandia National Laboratories geophysicist, launched a fleet of five solar-powered hot air balloons last year. They reached a height of 13 to 15 miles, twice as high as commercial jets, and detected the infrasound from a test explosion. Infrasound is sound of very low frequencies, below 20 hertz, which is lower than humans can hear, and can be used to monitor explosions, including those caused by nuclear tests. Bowman is also working with NASA to explore the possibility of sending these balloons to Venus and Jupiter.
The new study shows that locations that experienced earthquakes are tied in proximity and timeliness to mass waste water injection sites. Further, the study indicates that tracking annual data on the injection well locations can help predict how corresponding earthquake activity will change. This new finding builds on previous studies showing that earthquake activity increases when wastewater injections increase.
S&T’s Office of Standards understood the need to gather in-depth data to determine how to construct the next-generation icebreaker. To do that, they needed to see, first hand, how changes to the current construct reacted to ice.
Among the initial 18 scientists selected for French President Emmanuel Macron's "Make Our Planet Great Again" program is Louis Derry, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences in Cornell University’s College of Engineering and faculty fellow with the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future.
Though mass extinctions wiped out staggeringly high numbers of species, they barely touched the overall "functional" diversity--how each species makes a living, be it filtering phytoplankton or eating small crustaceans, burrowing or clamping onto rocks. University of Chicago scientists documented this surprising trend in a study on extinctions published Jan. 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We’re geeks, and we’re motivated.” That’s how Amin Amooie, a doctoral student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University, explained his team’s efforts to build the supercomputer they’ve dubbed “Buckeye Pi.”
Tulane University awarded the $1 million grand prize for the Tulane Nitrogen Reduction Challenge to Adapt-N, a team from Cornell University that developed a cloud-based computer modeling system to predict optimum nitrogen application rates for crops using data on weather, field conditions and soil management practices.
NAU Regents’ Professor Bruce Hungate, director of the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss), recently joined a new initiative lead by LLNL to study how the soil microbiome controls the mechanisms that regulate the stabilization of the organic matter in soil.
As the August 21 eclipse approached, researchers prepared to understand plants' response to light and temperature. The varied results have left the researchers with interesting questions.
Australian research scientists and industry are joining together to develop and commercialise new tools using cutting-edge digital technologies including machine learning that they say will be a game-changer for mining and exploration.
A scientist wants to know more about urban microclimates She’s launched a project to measure neighborhood-to-neighborhood differences in Baltimore, hoping to alert residents, guide city planners and ease some of the impact of climate change.
The Anthropocene epoch — the proposed name for this time of significant human effect on the planet and its systems — represents a new context in which to study literature. A new book of essays co-edited by a University of Washington English professor argues that literary studies, in turn, also can help us better understand the Anthropocene.
For his life’s work, Farouk El-Baz will receive the 2018 Inamori Ethics Prize from the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University during a ceremony and academic symposium Sept. 13-14.
Geologists have corrected a mix-up that made an ancient geological structure in the central U.S. seem hundreds of miles shorter than it really is. The biggest failed rift known to geologists is even bigger than originally thought, according to research that will be presented at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting Dec. 11 in New Orleans.
Two Vanderbilt experts show evidence that progress can continue to be made on climate change and other environmental issues regardless of what the government is doing.
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have shown for the first time that dark fiber – the vast network of unused fiber-optic cables installed throughout the country and the world – can be used as sensors for detecting earthquakes, the presence of groundwater, changes in permafrost conditions, and a variety of other subsurface activity.
Most volcanoes erupt beneath the ocean, but scientists know little about them compared to what they know about volcanoes that eject their lava on dry land. Researchers think that with improved monitoring, they can learn more about these submarine eruptions, which threaten travel and alter the ocean soundscape. During the 174th ASA meeting, held Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans, Gabrielle Tepp of the USGS will discuss the challenges and benefits of remote monitoring and what it can teach about submarine volcanoes.
There are out-of-the-way places. There are remote places. Then there are places like the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, where the nearest human being – possibly, the nearest living organism – is at least 150 miles away.
That’s where Rutgers University-New Brunswick planetary geologist Juliane Gross will spend six to eight weeks, beginning in December. An associate professor of earth and planetary sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences, she will recover meteorites for the Case Western Reserve University's Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Slowly but steadily, an enormous mass of warm rock is rising beneath part of New England, although a major volcanic eruption isn’t likely for millions of years, a Rutgers University-led study suggests. The research is unprecedented in its scope and challenges textbook concepts of geology.
Researchers at the University of New Hampshire are using scientific sleuthing to better understand the journey of magma in Mount Etna, to create a more accurate picture of the volcano’s plumbing system and determine how quickly the magma rises to the top to cause an eruption. Their findings contribute to our understanding of how and when volcanoes erupt.
The amount of biomass – life – in Earth's ancient oceans may have been limited due to low recycling of the key nutrient phosphorus, according to new research by the University of Washington and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Volcanism is sometimes like food poisoning, where the Earth spews forth unstable material. New research from Michigan Technological University, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and ETH Zurich shows that a significant pulse of volatile carbon was released from the Earth’s mantle around 500 million years ago. But why?
WASHINGTON _ Dr. Francisca Oboh-Ikuenobe of Missouri University of Science and Technology has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for her contributions to the advancement of palynology ─ the study of organic-walled microfossils such as pollen and spores ─ and her outstanding efforts in educating the next generation of Earth scientists.
A team of researchers, including a faculty member and postdoctoral fellow from Washington University in St. Louis, found that oxygen levels appear to increase at about the same time as a three-fold increase in biodiversity during the Ordovician Period, between 445 and 485 million years ago, according to a study published Nov. 20 in Nature Geoscience.
Acoustical waves and vibrations allow us to hear and experience the world with fuller sensory stimulation. Acoustics has applications that cover a broad spectrum of topics including anthropogenic noise in marine environments, the dangers of hospital noise, and auditory sensitivity after drinking. The Acoustical Society of America’s fall meeting this year will showcase the diversity of sound and its applications, held Dec. 4-8, 2017, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
If someone cries "Eureka!" because it looks like oxygen appeared in Earth's ancient atmosphere long before the body of evidence indicated, consider this: If it was a chromium isotope system reading that caused the enthusiasm, it might need to be curbed.
A tiny aquatic plant called duckweed might be a viable option for remove phosphorus, nitrates, nitrites and even heavy metals from lakes, ponds and slow-moving waterbodies.
Prehistoric polar forests were built for survival, but were not hardy enough to live in ultra-high concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. A UWM geologist is studying the tree fossil record in Antarctica from a mass extinction 250 million years ago, looking for clues to how greenhouse gases affected plants -- then and now.
Crowdsourcing created an online photography archive, financed a British rock band’s tour and advanced a search for intelligent life on other planets. Now a biologist is hoping the approach can help her find rocks. But not just any rocks.