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A volcano erupting on a small island in the Sub Antarctic is depositing ash over one of the world’s largest penguin colonies.

Zavodovski Island is a small island in the South Sandwich archipelago and its volcano Mt Curry has been erupting since March 2016. The island is home to over one million chinstrap penguins – the largest colony for this species in the world.

Droughts in California are mainly controlled by wind, not by the amount of evaporated moisture in the air, new research has found. The research increases the understanding of how the water cycle is related to extreme events and could eventually help in predicting droughts and floods.

The findings were published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, on June 30. The research increases the understanding of how the water cycle is related to extreme events and could eventually help in predicting droughts and floods, said lead author Jiangfeng Wei, a research scientist at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences.

"Ocean evaporation provides moisture for California precipitation but is not the reason for droughts there, although the ocean evaporation is slightly lower during droughts," Wei said.

The common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is the most important food legume in the tropics. It is an inexpensive source of proteins and minerals for almost 400 million people, mainly from Africa and Latin America. It is generally cultivated by small farmers and subject to conditions limiting their productivity. Drought affects 60% of bean crops around the world and can cause from 10% in productivity losses to a total of 100% in some cases.

Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Bean Programme at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia have identified drought-resistant genotypes and the morpho-physiological characteristics related to this resistance. The experiments were conducted in Palmira, Colombia, from June to September in 2012 and 2013, and the results were recently published in Frontiers in Plant Science.

Los científicos en el MIT y en otras partes han identificado las "primeras huellas de mejora" de la capa de ozono en la Antártida, publicadas hoy en la revista Science.

El equipo encontró que el agujero de ozono de septiembre ha reducido en más de 4 millones de kilómetros cuadrados (alrededor de la mitad del área de EEUU) desde el año 2000, cuando el agotamiento del ozono estaba en su apogeo. El equipo también demostró por primera vez que esta recuperación se ha ralentizado un poco, a veces, debido a los efectos de las erupciones volcánicas de año en año. En general, sin embargo, el agujero de ozono parece estar en un camino de sanación.

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Typhoon Nepartak after it became a major typhoon in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean.

The second tropical cyclone of the northwestern Pacific Ocean season formed on July 3 and strengthened quickly into a tropical storm that was named Nepartak.

On July 5 at 0359 UTC (11:59 p.m. EDT) infrared data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder aboard NASA's Aqua satellite detected strong thunderstorms completely surrounding the center of Nepartak with temperatures colder than minus 63 degrees Celsius (minus 81 Fahrenheit). Temperatures that could indicate very powerful thunderstorms with cloud tops high into the troposphere. Bands of powerful thunderstorms wrapped into the low-level center of circulation from the northwest and southeast.