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A UBC-led research team has developed a new global coral bleaching database that could help scientists predict future bleaching events.

Global warming is a concept very well-known to people today, even those who are not particularly invested in such matters. However, this knowledge becomes obsolete very quickly. Take the greenhouse effect. We all have heard about the ??2 emissions and their detrimental effect on our planet. According to the US EPA data, 76% of all greenhouse gas emissions are carbon dioxide, and 16% - methane (??4). However, despite this great differential, methane is actually much more dangerous. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives a good insight into that. As per their research, the greenhouse activity of methane is 28 times higher than that of carbon dioxide in the timeframe of 100 years and 80 times higher if the next 20 years are taken into account. Moreover, methane concentration in the atmosphere grows exponentially. And the explanation for that may be derived from our distant past.

By examining the cooling rate of rocks that formed more than 10 miles beneath the Earth’s surface, scientists led by The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences have found that water probably penetrates deep into the crust and upper mantle at mid-ocean spreading zones, the places where new crust is made. The finding adds evidence to one side of a long-standing debate on how magma from the Earth’s mantle cools to form the lower layers of crust.

Nick Dygert, a postdoctoral fellow in the Jackson School’s Department of Geological Sciences, led the research which was published in May in the print edition of Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Collaborators include Peter Kelemen of Colombia University and Yan Liang of Brown University.

They found it in the Illinois River near the city of Marseilles, Illinois, about 80 miles west of Lake Michigan – a strange entry point for an invasive Asian clam. The scientists who found it have no idea how it got there. But the discovery – along with genetic tests that confirm its uniqueness – means that a new species or “form” of invasive clam has made its official debut in North America.

The researchers report the find in the journal BioInvasions Records.

A vigorous weather system has generated severe weather over the mid-section of the U.S. and satellites are providing a look at it as it is moving toward the East Coast.

NASA and NOAA satellites have been tracking a storm system that has generated flooding and tornadic thunderstorms in the central U.S. and is expected bring severe weather to the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, data from NOAA's GOES-East satellite were used to create images and an animation of the movement of the powerful storm.