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Geology News And Research - February 2008 Archives
 | Not too long ago, a lake sprung a leak in the high country of the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains. The lake drained away, as glacier-dammed lakes often do, but this lake was a bit different, and seems to be telling a story about a warmer Alaska. ...> Full Article |
In the science world, in the media, and recently, in our daily lives, the debate continues over how carbon in the atmosphere is affecting global climate change. Studying just how carbon cycles throughout the Earth is an enormous challenge, but one Northwestern University professor is doing his part by studying one important segment -- rivers.
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 | Simulation May Help Big Cities Develop Early Warning Systems ...> Full Article |
 | The entrenched political instability in Pakistan and Afghanistan is of grave concern to many in the West - but now geologists at ANU have suggested a new cause for the seismic instability that regularly rocks the region. ...> Full Article |
 | The first direct evidence of how and when tectonic plates move into the deepest reaches of the Earth has been detailed in Nature. Scientists hope their description of how plates collide with one sliding below the other into the rocky mantle could potentially improve their ability to assess earthquake risks. ...> Full Article |
 | A new NASA study confirms that the surface temperature of Greenland's massive ice sheet has been rising, stoked by warming air temperatures, and fueling loss of the island's ice at the surface and throughout the mass beneath. ...> Full Article |
 | Frost flowers. Diamond dust. Hoarfrost. These poetically named ice crystal forms are part of the stark beauty of the Arctic. But they also play a role in its pollution, a new study by scientists at the University of Michigan, the Cold Regions Research & Engineering Laboratory and the University of Alaska has found. ...> Full Article |
Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have found that winter precipitation - such as rain and snow - became more intense in the UK during the last 100 years.
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It's getting harder and harder to blame mankind for causing the gradual increase in global temperatures that are now being seen in the climate record, scientists said today.
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The Nevada and eastern California region experienced one of its quietest years on record for earthquake activity, according to a study by the University's Nevada Seismological Laboratory.
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The surprise discovery of university-owned rights to oil and natural gas in southern Alberta is leading to first-hand lessons in the energy sector for students and researchers who have begun exploring the potential of the reserves using some of the latest technology in exploration geology.
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 | The current La Niña event, characterized by a cooling of the sea surface in the central and eastern Equatorial Pacific, has strengthened slightly in recent months and is expected to continue through the first quarter of 2008, with a likelihood of persisting through to the middle of the year. ...> Full Article |
 | If carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels continue on a "business-as-usual" trajectory, humans will have added about 5 trillion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere by the year 2400. A similarly massive release of carbon accompanied an extreme period of global warming 55 million years ago known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). ...> Full Article |
 | More than 40 percent of the world's oceans are heavily affected by human activities, and few if any areas remain untouched, according to the first global-scale study of human influence on marine ecosystems. By overlaying maps of 17 different activities such as fishing, climate change, and pollution, the researchers have produced a composite map of the toll that humans have exacted on the seas. ...> Full Article |
 | Every nook and cranny of the province, from its forests to its foothills, has for the first time been recorded on a unique map by the University of Alberta. ...> Full Article |
Earth scientists at The University of Manchester have found that carbon dioxide has been naturally stored for more than a million years in several gas fields in the Colorado Plateau and Rocky Mountains of the United States.
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 | With digital imaging techniques, scientists find new data in old aerial photographs ...> Full Article |
 | Analysis of current and scheduled use and human-induced
climate change sparks urgent warning from researchers at
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego ...> Full Article |
A University of Illinois at Chicago scientist will lead a team testing a robotic probe in a polar-style, under-ice exploration that may have out-of-this world applications.
...> Full Article
 | Although its name sounds like a low-budget horror movie, you won't find "Red Tide" at a theater near you. To take in this natural phenomenon, you'll have to venture to the ocean, because red tide - or more scientifically, HAB or harmful algae bloom - occurs when a harmful variety of algae reproduces so densely that the water appears red, yellowish-brown or green from the high concentrations of photosynthetic pigments. ...> Full Article |
 | Death Valley may be known by its three superlatives: hottest, driest, and lowest - as in temperature, rainfall, and elevation in the United States. But it was the flow of water through the National Park that attracted Boston College Asst. Prof. of Geology and Geophysics Noah P. Snyder to the desert of eastern California. ...> Full Article |
 | Researchers have presented evidence that their theory about the core of the earth is correct. Among other applications, the findings may be of significance for our understanding of the cooling down of the earth, and of the stability of the earth's magnetic field. ...> Full Article |
When the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica collapsed in 2002, the event appeared to be a sudden response to climate change, and this long, fringing ice shelf in the north west part of the Weddell Sea was assumed to be the latest in a long line of victims of Antarctic summer heat waves linked to Global Warming.
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 | Natural processes may prevent oceans from warming beyond a certain point, helping protect some coral reefs from the impacts of climate change, new research finds. The study, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), finds evidence that an ocean "thermostat" appears to be helping to regulate sea-surface temperatures in a biologically diverse region of the western Pacific. ...> Full Article |
 | Theoretical physicists at the University of Chicago are suggesting how thin spouts of magma in the Earth's mantle can persist long enough to form hotspot volcanism of the type that might have created the Hawaiian Islands. ...> Full Article |
 | Why do some earthquakes terminate along a fault, while others jump or step-over a gap to another fault? ...> Full Article |
A team of climate experts has compiled a shortlist of nine areas in the world that are in danger of passing critical thresholds or 'tipping points' due to climate change
...> Full Article
 | The theory that ancient mega-tsunamis once swamped the Australian coast - leaving deposits up to 30km inland - is severely undermined by the archaeological evidence ...> Full Article |
 | Two hydroelectricity dams appear to be threatening the health of Lake Victoria -- and of the people living along its shores who depend on the lake for food. A new study¹ suggests that the dams' systematic overuse of water has decreased the lake level by at least two meters between 2000 and 2006 -- and that this drop was not influenced by weather. ...> Full Article |
 | Researchers in a new Science article published online warn that human-caused climate change has dramatically altered the water flow over the past 50 years in several Western states. ...> Full Article |
 | A new University of Colorado at Boulder study has shown that ice caps on the northern plateau of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic have shrunk by more than 50 percent in the last half century as a result of warming, and are expected to disappear by the middle of the century. ...> Full Article |
 | Hydrocarbons -- molecules critical to life -- are being generated by the simple interaction of seawater with the rocks under the Lost City hydrothermal vent field in the mid-Atlantic Ocean. ...> Full Article |
Only lab of its kind worldwide
...> Full Article
 | More evidence of changing weather patterns around the Antarctic Peninsula - a region where climate has changed rapidly over the last 50 years - is published this month in Geophysical Research Letters (online). ...> Full Article |
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