Category: Earth

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain The shimmering green, red and purple curtains of the northern and southern lights—the auroras—may be the best-known phenomena lighting up the nighttime sky, but the most mysterious are the mauve and white streaks called Steve and their frequent companion, a glowing green “picket fence.” First recognized in 2018 as distinct from…

Environmental activists display placards during a demonstration at the venue of the COP28 United Nations climate summit in Dubai. The last time carbon dioxide in the atmosphere consistently matched today’s human-driven levels was 14 million years ago, according to a large new study Thursday that paints a grim picture of where Earth’s climate is headed.…

Researchers, including those from the University at Buffalo, have discovered that Greenland’s peripheral glaciers are retreating at an alarming rate, with the 21st-century retreat rate doubling compared to the 20th century. This finding, derived from satellite and historical aerial data, highlights the glaciers’ rapid response to climate change and the consequent risk of rising sea…

Can amino acids, the key building blocks of life, survive high-speed impacts from a spacecraft orbiting another world? This is what a recent study published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) hopes to find out as a team of researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) conducted laboratory experiments…

Researchers discovered that the Earth’s lower mantle becomes more viscous at depths of 800 to 1,200 kilometers, due to bridgmanite-enriched rocks. These rocks, with larger grain sizes, affect geophysical and geochemical processes. Prof. Dr. Tomoo Katsura and his international research team at the Bavarian Research Institute of Experimental Geochemistry and Geophysics, University of Bayreuth, have…

In the context of the “Tethys one-way train” (long-term cyclical northward breakup-drifting of Gondwana continental fragments), an increase in low-latitude continental area leads to the decrease in global temperature; the subduction of oceanic plates enriching in organic-rich sediments affects the arc magma oxygen fugacity. Credit: Science China Press A recent study, published in Science China…

(a) The Proto-Tethys tectonic domain in western China. (b) The Paleo-Tethys tectonic domain in eastern China. “Sub”, “Col”, “Exh”, and “P-co” denote subduction, collision, exhumation, and post-collisional stages, respectively. “C” and “O” represent continental and oceanic subduction, respectively. Credit: Science China Press A synthesis study published in Science China Earth Sciences is led by Prof.…

A photograph of a farmer showing his affected plot due to drought in Karnataka, India, 2012. Credit: Pushkarv/Wikipedia Almost 1 in every 4 people on Earth are now stricken by drought, and it’s just the start of things to come, according to the latest UN report released as the COP28 climate summit gets underway in…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Spectacular Svalbard sits halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole and is one of the fastest warming places in the Arctic. It is also home to glaciers which are, to use the words of Dr. Will Harcourt, a glaciologist from the University of Aberdeen, “speeding up.” Dr. Harcourt and his…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Rainfall estimations on O’ahu can be more accurate by combining Hawai’i’s two main types of rainfall observations, radar and rain gauge, according to a study by University of Hawai’i at Mānoa researchers. Current observations are based on one or the other, where specific weather stations are checked (rain gauge), or weather…