• Scientists shed light on carbon's descent into the deep Earth

    Examining conditions within the Earth’s interior is crucial not only to give us a window back to Earth’s history but also to understand the current environment and its future. This study offers an explanation of carbon’s descent into the deep Earth. “The stability regions of carbonates are key to understanding the deep carbon cycle and the role of the deep Earth in the global carbon cycle.” says Leonid Dubrovinsky, from the University of Bayreuth. “The intense X-rays from the ESRF allow us to access the extreme conditions within the entire Earth’s mantle.” underlines Valerio Cerantola, lead author, former PhD student at the University of Bayreuth and now postdoctoral scientist at the ESRF.

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  • NASA Spots a Diminished, but Drenching Ex-Tropical Cyclone Don

    Tropical Storm Don didn't live long before it weakened to a remnant low pressure area in the North Atlantic Ocean. Before it weakened NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured a visible image of the storm on its approach to the Windward Islands. The GPM satellite analyzed the storm's rainfall as it developed and moderate to heavy rainfall is expected to accompany the remnants in the Windward Islands on July 19.

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  • Sea temperature changes contributing to droughts

    Fluctuations in sea surface temperature are a factor in causing persistent droughts in North America and around the Mediterranean, new research suggests. 

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  • Record-breaking marine heatwave cooks Tasmania's fisheries

    Climate change was almost certainly responsible for a marine heatwave off Tasmania’s east coast in 2015/16 that lasted 251 days and at its greatest extent was seven times the size of Tasmania, according to a new study published today in Nature Communications.

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  • NASA Looks at Compact Tropical Storm Don in Infrared Light

    NASA's Aqua satellite passed over newly formed Tropical Storm Don gathering temperature data from the compact storm's clouds.

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  • 3-D Models Help Scientists Gauge Flood Impact

    Heavy rainfall can cause rivers and drainage systems to overflow or dams to break, leading to flood events that bring damage to property and road systems as well potential loss of human life.

    One such event in 2008 cost $10 billion in damages for the entire state of Iowa. After the flood, the Iowa Flood Center (IFC) at the University of Iowa (UI) was established as the first center in the United States for advanced flood-related research and education.

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  • Man-Made Aerosols Identified as Driver in Shifting Global Rainfall Patterns

    In a new study, scientists found that aerosol particles released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are a primary driver of changes in rainfall patterns across the globe.

    The results of the climate system-model simulations conducted by researchers Brian Soden and Eui-Seok Chung from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science revealed that changes in clouds, as a result of their interaction with these man-made aerosols in the atmosphere, are driving large-scale shifts in rainfall and temperature on Earth.

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  • Removing CO2 from the air required to safeguard children's future

    Reducing greenhouse-gas emissions is not enough to limit global warming to a level that wouldn’t risk young people’s future, according to a new study by a team of scientists who say we need negative emissions. Measures such as reforestation could accomplish much of the needed CO2 removal from the atmosphere, but continued high fossil fuel emissions would demand expensive technological solutions to extract CO2 and prevent dangerous warming. The study is published today in Earth System Dynamics, a journal of the European Geosciences Union.

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  • New model reveals how ocean acidification challenges tiny sea snails off U.S. West Coast

    A tiny sea snail, sometimes called a sea butterfly because of how it flutters about traveling the ocean currents, is part of the diet for such valuable fish as salmon and cod off the U.S West Coast.

    A new study models the journey of this delicate plankton from offshore to nearshore waters, describing how changing ocean chemistry along this journey affects their condition.

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  • Stronger winds heat up West Antarctic ice melt

    New research published today in Nature Climate Change has revealed how strengthening winds on the opposite side of Antarctica, up to 6000kms away, drive the high rate of ice melt along the West Antarctic Peninsula.

    Researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science found that the winds in East Antarctica can generate sea-level disturbances that propagate around the continent at almost 700 kilometers per hour via a type of ocean wave known as a Kelvin wave.

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