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Una vez al día, una ola tan alta como el Empire State Building y tan ancha como cien millas se forma en las aguas entre Taiwán y las Filipinas y fluye a través del Mar del Sur de China, pero en la superficie, que apenas se nota.

Estas monstruosidades diarias se llaman "olas internas", ya que están por debajo de la superficie del océano y aunque los científicos han sabido de ellas desde hace años, no estaban muy seguros de lo importante que eran, porque nunca habían sido totalmente rastreadas desde que se forman hasta que desaparecen.

Pero un nuevo estudio, publicado esta semana en la Nature letter Research, documenta lo que ocurre con las ondas internas en el final de su viaje y describe su papel fundamental en el clima global. El proyecto internacional de investigación fue financiado por la Oficina de Investigación Naval y el Consejo Nacional de Ciencias de Taiwán.

Research by an Indiana University environmental scientist and colleagues at universities in Iowa and Washington finds that potentially harmful growth-promoting hormones used in beef production are expected to persist in the environment at higher concentrations and for longer durations than previously thought.

"What we release into the environment is just the starting point for a complex series of chemical reactions that can occur, sometimes with unintended consequences," said Adam Ward, lead author of the study and assistant professor in the IU Bloomington School of Public and Environmental Affairs. "When compounds react in a way we don't anticipate -- when they convert between species, when they persist after we thought they were gone -- this challenges our regulatory system."

There's more to Yellowstone National Park than meets the eye. Much more, as it turns out.

You might already know that a supervolcano dominates the famous park that is situated on land in Wyoming and Montana. A shallow subsurface magma chamber has long been known.

But now a second, much larger reservoir of partially molten rock has been discovered by researchers at the University of Utah. There's enough magma inside, they say, to fill the Grand Canyon more than 11 times.

Approximately $19 billion worth of electricity, equal to the  output of 50 large power plants, is devoured annually by U.S. household electronics, appliances, and other equipment when consumers are not actively using them, according to a groundbreaking study released today by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

For the first time since we began tracking carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, the monthly global average concentration of this greenhouse gas surpassed 400 parts per million in March 2015,  according to NOAA’s latest results.