Carbon dioxide measured by a NASA satellite pinpoints sources of the gas from human and volcanic activities, which may help monitor greenhouse gases responsible for climate change.
Viruses exist amidst all bacteria, usually in a 10-fold excess and include virophages which live in giant viruses and use their machinery to replicate and spread. In Nature Communications, a team including DOE JGI researchers reports effectively doubling the number of known virophages.
New research published in the open access peer-reviewed journal PeerJ uses law enforcement data collected from 2010 to 2015 to understand the geographical distribution of the illegal use of natural resources across the region’s protected area network.
University of Utah scientists have mapped the near-surface geology around Old Faithful, revealing the reservoir of heated water that feeds the geyser’s surface vent and how the ground shaking behaves in between eruptions. The map was made possible by a dense network of portable seismographs and by new seismic analysis techniques.
When a normally cold stream in Iceland was warmed, the make-up of life inside changed as larger organisms thrived while smaller ones struggled. The findings carry implications for life in a warming climate.
Explosive volcanic eruptions in the tropics can lead to El Niño events, those notorious warming periods in the Pacific Ocean with dramatic global impacts on the climate, according to a new study.
A team of scientists has found new evidence that the Great Permian Extinction, which occurred approximately 250 million years ago, was caused by massive volcanic eruptions that led to significant environmental changes.
West Virginia University geology researchers are measuring the quantity and quality of the water along Peters Mountain in collaboration with the Indian Creek Watershed Association.
Ancient DNA extracted from fossil bones and museum specimens has shed new light on the mysterious loss of the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine) from Australia’s mainland.
Last week’s magnitude 7.1 earthquake near Puebla, Mexico, killed and injured hundreds of people and caused widespread damage to structures in Mexico City. Civil engineering professor Clint Wood, a geotechnical-engineering specialist, will travel to Mexico City this week to study the earthquake’s impact on buildings and infrastructure in the area.
The National Science Foundation recently awarded a $680,000 grant to Wake Forest University Associate Professor of Chemistry Patricia Dos Santos. In addition to funding research that helps scientists better understand life on earth, the grant also enables her to mentor students from other Triad-area colleges.
West Virginia University professors Paul Ziemkiewicz, Shikha Sharma and Tim Carr will present research on technology in the shale industry at the Shale Insight Conference on Wednesday, Sept. 27 in Pittsburgh, Pa.
The U-led study is the first attempt to map escape routes for wildland fire fighters from an aerial perspective. The researchers used LiDAR technology to analyze the terrain slope, ground surface roughness and vegetation density of a fire-prone region in central Utah, and assessed how each landscape condition impeded a person’s ability to travel.
A Texas A&M University research team has examined a 100,000-year-old ocean core and found that there have been at least eight occurrences of iron penetrating the Pacific Ocean, each likely associated with abrupt global climate change over thousands of years.
Satellite data shows underground water reserves in California’s Silicon Valley rebounded quickly after the recent severe drought. The research points to the success of aggressive conservation measures and lays the groundwork for low-cost monitoring of subterranean water reserves around the world.
Researchers in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis are challenging the notion that environment drives the evolution of brain size. A new study was released Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Searching for water, some tree roots probe hundreds of feet deep and many trees send roots through cracks in rocks, according to a new study led by a Rutgers University-New Brunswick professor. Moreover, the depth of plant roots, which varies between species and soil conditions, will play a key role in plants’ adaptation to climate change, said Ying Fan Reinfelder, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Department of Environmental Sciences.
Missouri S&T geologist Dr. Wan Yang has devoted his academic career to unlocking the mysteries of thePermian mass extinction more than 250 million years ago. That geological odyssey now finds him leading an 11-institution consortium that’s been collectively awarded a $2.1 million National Science Foundation research grant.
The University of Adelaide will lead a $14.6 million research consortium to develop advanced technologies to boost South Australia’s copper production and develop a globally competitive mining technology services sector in the state.
New research led by the University of Delaware resolves debate over the strength of olivine, the most abundant mineral in the Earth's mantle. Measuring olivine’s strength is critical to understanding how strong tectonic plates are, which matters to how plates break and create subduction zones.
East Africa may be a long way from the Crescent City but it is top of mind for Tulane PhD student Sarah Oliva, who is studying data from volcanoes and earthquakes in that region. Her goal is a better understanding of how a 3,000-kilometer long deep valley– the East African rift system— formed. Ultimately, she hopes her research will enable her to work with scientists and help governments protect residents living near the rift.
A new rare-earth magnet recycling process developed by researchers at the Critical Materials Institute (CMI) dissolves magnets in an acid-free solution and recovers high purity rare earth elements.
Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have reported the first observation of sea level “fingerprints,” tell-tale differences in sea level rise around the world in response to changes in continental water and ice sheet mass. The team’s findings were published today in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Using a fleet of airplanes, ships and intrepid scientists, Cornell is leading the largest single deployment of seismometers along the Alaskan Peninsula – a $4.5 million endeavor that geologists from across the country hope will solve long-standing mysteries about the region and the planet.
It may seem counterintuitive, but Sacramento State Professor Jamie Kneitel is traveling to Israel this fall to learn more about seasonal wetlands in California, as well as those elsewhere in the world.
New research, led by the University of Southampton and involving a team of international scientists, suggests that an extreme global warming event 56 million years ago was driven by massive CO2 emissions from volcanoes, during the formation of the North Atlantic Ocean.
A fungus known to decimate populations of gypsy moths creates “death clouds” of spores that can travel more than 40 miles to potentially infect populations of invasive moths, according to a new Cornell study.
By listening to the acoustic signal emitted by a laboratory-created earthquake, a computer science approach using machine learning can predict the time remaining before the fault fails.
Charles R. Bentley, an intrepid University of Wisconsin-Madison glaciologist and geophysicist who was among the first scientists to measure the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in the late 1950s, died Aug. 19 in Oakland, California. He was 87.
South Dakota State University was ranked 27th worldwide and 7th in the United States for research productivity in the area of remote sensing, according to ShanghaiRanking’s 2017 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects.
A new University of Utah-led study shows that targeted forest regeneration among the largest and closest forest fragments in the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania and the Atlantic Forest of Brazil can dramatically reduce extinction rates of bird species over time.
A group of Western Illinois University biologists and biology graduate and undergraduate students are working with the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center (UMESC) to conduct ecological studies on Asian carp in the Upper Illinois and Mississippi rivers.
Nature’s way of forming soil takes a great deal of patience. The Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) August 15 Soils Matter blog post explains the complex process of soils forming and maturing.
New research from the University of New Hampshire has led to the development of a novel technique to determine the surface area and volume of small particles, the size of a grain of sand or smaller. Due to their tiny size, irregular shape and limited viewing angle, commonly used microscopic imaging techniques cannot always capture the whole object’s shape often leaving out valuable information that can be important in numerous areas of science, engineering and medicine.
Alex McVey, a senior majoring in Earth system science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (AUH), served as the project lead this summer for NASA DEVELOP’s Rwanda ecological forecasting project.
Wastewater injection rates in Oklahoma have declined recently because of regulatory actions and market forces, but seismologists say that has not yet significantly reduced the risk of potentially damaging earthquakes.
The stresses released by human-induced and naturally occurring earthquakes in the central United States are in many cases indistinguishable, meaning that existing tools to predict shaking damage can be applied to both types.