Today, the Salton Sea is an eerie place. Its mirror-like surface belies the toxic stew within. Fish skeletons line its shores and the ruins of a once thriving vacation playground is a reminder of better days.
In many streams and rivers, water moves between the open channel and the adjacent groundwater, enabling reactions that can remove or transform carbon, contaminants, and nutrients. Researchers developed a new modeling strategy to represent these effects in watershed-scale models. The new model addresses current models’ limited ability to simulate how carbon, nutrients, and contaminants move and transform in river corridors and allows for a new generation of research on river networks.
Magmatic volatile contents, such as water, are abundant in volcanic arc melts and influence magma evolution, dynamics of volcanic eruptions and the formation of ore deposits.
This increased amount of water has broad implications for understanding how Earth’s lower crust forms, how magma erupts through the crust, and how economically important mineral ore deposits form, according to a new paper led by authors from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), “High water content of arc magmas recorded in cumulates from subduction zone lower crust,” published in Nature Geoscience.
Urban construction, especially the ongoing large-scale expansion and utilization of underground space, has resulted in massive excavated soil and rock (ESR) from buildings and subways.
Billions of years ago, a series of volcanic eruptions broke loose on the moon, blanketing hundreds of thousands of square miles of the orb’s surface in hot lava.
In a study published in the journal Nature Communications, Andrea Mundl-Petermeier and Sebastian Viehmann of the Department of Lithospheric Research at the University of Vienna have demonstrated that a new geochemical archive - 182Tungsten in banded iron formations - can be used to simultaneously trace both the evolution of the Earth's mantle and continents throughout Earth’s history. This offers new opportunities to better understand the Precambrian Earth in the future.
The massive Jan. 15 eruption of the undersea Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in the South Pacific Ocean was a once-in-a-century event that allowed an international group of 76 scientists using multiple forms of technology to crowdsource their data in ways never before possible.
New research by an international team from 17 countries including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist Keehoon Kim demonstrates that based on atmospheric pressure waves recorded by global barometers, the Hunga explosion was comparable in size to that of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption.
A Florida State University faculty member has been named a 2022 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist by the European Geosciences Union (EGU). Richard Bono, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science, received the award in the EGU’s Earth magnetism and rock physics division.
Ice shelves are floating extensions of glaciers. If Greenland’s second largest ice shelf breaks up, it may not recover unless Earth’s future climate cools considerably. This is the result of a new study, published in Nature Communications.
A new study finds evidence of surprisingly rapid upward movement of earth’s crust on the island of Taiwan. Over roughly half a million years, the Coastal Range of east Taiwan was rising at a rate of 9 to 14 millimeters per year, the research shows.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Cornell College W.H. Norton Professor of Geology Rhawn Denniston a $199,785 grant to study the use of stalagmites as records of prehistoric fire activity in the Australian tropics.
Using satellite imagery to study the effects of a 2019 landslide on the Amalia Glacier in Patagonia, a University of Minnesota-led research team found the landslide helped stabilize the glacier and caused it to grow by about 1,000 meters over the last three years.
A URI-led expedition to the Puerto Rico Trench took what researchers believe to be the deepest water core samples ever taken in the Atlantic. They’re also the deepest water cores taken anywhere in the oceans since 1962.
During the 20th century, earthquakes in Europe accounted for more than 200,000 deaths and over 250 billion Euros in losses.
The lake level of the Dead Sea is currently dropping by more than one metre every year - mainly because of the heavy water consumption in the catchment area.
In a new article published in the Journal of Biogeography, SUNY Geneseo geographer Associate Professor Stephen Tulowiecki and four undergraduate researchers examined the influence of Native American land use on the composition of historic forests in the Northeastern United States. The team found that Native American settlements and land use had a lesser effect on the distribution of tree species across the region when compared to climate and soil conditions.
Saturn’s moon Titan looks very much like Earth from space, with rivers, lakes, and seas filled by rain tumbling through a thick atmosphere.
The 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes shocked inhabitants of the western island of Kyushu, causing hundreds of casualties and serious damage to vital infrastructure.
The 12 August 2021 South Sandwich Island earthquake had a surprise hidden within its complex rupture sequence: a slow, shallow magnitude 8.16 subevent that was “invisible” to researchers at first glance.
A geologic formation near Aix-en-Provence, France, is famed as one of the world’s chief treasure troves of fossil species from the Cenozoic Era. Since the late 1700s, scientists there have been unearthing amazingly well-preserved fossilized plants and animals.
Tiny zircons found in South Africa point to an early start for the active global process that shapes Earth’s surface and climate.
Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Geological Survey have entered a partnership to produce advanced computer models to predict the behavior of wildfires and prescribed fires. Models will help fire, land and emergency managers plan for, respond to and study the effects of fire on natural landscapes and in the wildland-urban interface.
When a large ice sheet begins to melt, global-mean sea level rises, but local sea level near the ice sheet may in fact drop. In American Journal of Physics, a researcher illustrates this effect through a series of calculations, beginning with a simple, analytically tractable model and progressing through more sophisticated mathematical estimations of ice distributions and gravitation of displaced seawater mass. The paper includes numerical results for sea level change resulting from a 1,000-gigatonne loss of ice, with parameter values appropriate to the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
In disaster mitigation planning for future large earthquakes, seismic ground motion predictions are a crucial part of early warning systems and seismic hazard mapping.
Rather than digging to identify unmarked mass grave sites or evidence to locate missing persons, new technologies are helping law enforcement agents, forensic scientists and historians uncover attempts to hide victims.
A group of Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian geologists provide critical new evidence for the timing of volcanic activity in the Karoo province, the largest of the Jurassic magma systems. The remnants of the province are widespread in southern Africa and Antarctica.
Deserts may seem lifeless and inert, but they are very much alive. Sand dunes, in particular, grow and move – and according to a decades long research project, they also breathe humid air.
Satellite data has confirmed that an ice shelf about the size of Manhattan has completely collapsed in East Antarctica within days of record high temperatures. The Conger ice shelf, which had an approximate surface area of 1,200 square km, collapsed around March 15, scientists confirmed today.
The Greenland Ice Sheet is the second largest ice body in the world, and it has the potential to contribute significantly to global sea-level rise in a warming global climate.
Earthquakes are famously impossible to predict, and have been the cause of some of the most devastating events in human history. But could we learn more about these natural disasters by tracking them backwards through time?
Planetary scientist Christopher Edwards and his team will use renewed NASA funding for Mars Science Lab Curiosity Rover project to continue exploring the rock record on the Red Planet.
Earthquakes themselves affect the movement of Earth's tectonic plates, which in turn could impact on future earthquakes, according to new research from the University of Copenhagen.
For the first 2 billion years of Earth’s history, there was barely any oxygen in the air. While some microbes were photosynthesizing by the latter part of this period, oxygen had not yet accumulated at levels that would impact the global biosphere.
Danish and Swedish researchers have dated the enormous Hiawatha impact crater, a 31 km-wide meteorite crater buried under a kilometer of Greenlandic ice.
Irvine, Calif., March 10, 2022 – An analysis of Antarctica’s Pope, Smith and Kohler glaciers by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Houston and other institutions has revealed an aggressive pattern of retreat connected to high melt rates of floating ice in the Amundsen Sea Embayment sector of West Antarctica.
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It is easy to see that the processes in the Earth's interior influence what happens on the surface. For example, volcanoes unearth magmatic rocks and emit gases into the atmosphere, and thus influence the biogeochemical cycles on our planet.
The Popocatépetl volcano, located southeast of Mexico City, stands as the second highest peak in Mexico and is considered to be one of the potentially most dangerous volcanoes in the world, given its record of highly explosive eruptions over the last 23,000 years.
Geologists at Lund University in Sweden have mapped 300 years of research on the prehistoric marine reptiles known as ichthyosaurs.
The icefields that stretch for hundreds of miles atop the Andes mountain range in Chile and Argentina are melting at some of the fastest rates on the planet. The ground that was beneath this ice is also shifting and rising as these glaciers disappear. Geologists have discovered a link between recent ice mass loss, rapid rock uplift and a gap between tectonic plates that underlie Patagonia.
Lava domes form at the top of many volcanoes when viscous lava erupts.
An object hidden below ground has been located using quantum technology - a long-awaited milestone with profound implications for industry, human knowledge and national security.
University of Utah researchers know well how rock towers and arches shimmy, twist and sway in response to far-off earthquakes, wind and even ocean waves. Their latest research compiles a first-of-its-kind dataset to show that the dynamic properties, i.e. the frequencies at which the rocks vibrate and the ways they deform during that vibration, can be largely predicted using the same mathematics that describe how beams in built structures resonate.
The source of Earth’s water has been a longstanding debate and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists think they have the answer—and they found it by looking at rocks from the moon.
Here are some of the latest articles we've posted in the Physical Science channel.
A new study led by Prof. DING Lin from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (ITP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has revealed the evolution of the Central Tibetan Valley, which may shed light on the formation of Tibetan Plateau.
Earth's core, the deepest part of our planet, is characterized by extremely high pressure and temperature. It is composed of a liquid outer core and solid inner core.
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