News 2019

Italian and Geneva researchers unveil the cause of the often fatal earthquakes on the volcanic island of Ischia (Italy). Volcanic islands, such as Ischia in Italy, are often the scene of major natural disasters caused by earthquakes. But why is the earth shaking in Ischia? Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, the University of Roma Tre and the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV; Italy) have highlighted the phenomenon responsible for the periodic earthquakes that have struck the island of Ischia.

Ninety years after Dutch geologists excavated human fossils in central Java, scientists finally have pinpointed the fossils' age at around 120,000 years. In a study reported today in Nature , The University of Queensland's Associate Professor Michael Westaway and Professor Jian-xin Zhao helped to establish the age and a new chronology for "a critical site for understanding the later stages of human evolution".

An international team of geoscientists led by Caltech has used fiber optic communications cables stationed at the bottom of the North Sea as a giant seismic network, tracking both earthquakes and ocean waves. The project was, in part, a proof of concept. Oceans cover two-thirds of the earth's surface, but placing permanent seismometers under the sea is prohibitively expensive.

Scientists have for the first time shown that it is possible to detect the propagation of seismic waves on the seafloor using submarine telecommunications cables. According to their observations, this existing infrastructure could be used to detect earthquakes, as well as swell and underwater noise. The results are published on December 18, 2019, by researchers from the CNRS, OCA, IRD and Université Côte d'Azur working together in the Géoazur laboratory, in collaboration with the company Fébus Optics and the Centre de Physique des Particules de Marseille (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université) 1.

How did those planets form? Could they exist in our universe? Could Star Wars really happen? Stanford Earth experts on planetary formation, processes and habitability discuss the science behind the fictional saga. Space discoveries are in the news on a nearly weekly basis - but they may not leave an impression as impactful as the legend of Star Wars.

In small watercourses in Swiss agricultural catchments, pesticides pose an ecotoxicological risk. This was demonstrated by studies carried out in 2015 and 2017 under the National Surface Water Quality Monitoring Programme (NAWA SPEZ), where pesticide concentrations exceeded environmental quality standards for most of the study period.

In small watercourses in Swiss agricultural catchments, pesticides pose an ecotoxicological risk. This was demonstrated by studies carried out in 2015 and 2017 under the National Surface Water Quality Monitoring Programme (NAWA SPEZ), where pesticide concentrations exceeded environmental quality standards for most of the study period.

Understanding what influences the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been identified by the American Geophysical Union to be one of the foremost challenges in the earth sciences in the coming decades because of methane's hugely important role in meeting climate warming targets. Methane is the second most important human-made greenhouse gas and is rising in the atmosphere more rapidly than predicted for reasons that are not well-understood.

With 2019 on track to be one of the warmest years on record, a major new study reveals the impact of warming temperatures on Arctic vegetation, animal species, and human communities who rely on the stability of the Arctic food chain to survive. The study, published today in Science Advances by an international team of researchers, reports that the Arctic has warmed by 0.

Researchers at EPFL's Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory and the Weizmann Institute of Science have modeled the onset of slip between two bodies in frictional contact. Their work, a major step forward in the study of frictional rupture, could give us a better understanding of earthquakes - including how far and fast they travel.

Greenhouse gas emissions released directly from the movement of volcanic rocks are capable of creating massive global warming effects - a discovery which could transform the way scientists predict climate change, a new study reveals. Scientists' calculations based on how carbon-based greenhouse gas levels link to movements of magma just below earth's surface suggest that such geological change has caused the largest temporary global warming of the past 65 million years.

This animation shows the average amount of wildfire fuels across the country for five different types of vegetation: trees, coarse wood debris, duff (decomposing organic materials on the ground), herbaceous live vegetation and shrubs. Michael Billmire/Michigan Technological University It's hard to find a place in the U.S. that isn't impacted by wildfires and smoke.

New research from The Australian National University (ANU) and Geoscience Australia could provide a much clearer picture of the Australian landscape, and how to better manage it under a changing climate. The study, published , shows the Australian continent at its 'barest' - or least vegetated. Dr Dale Roberts designed a new mathematical algorithm that accurately estimates the earth's reflected light at every location from satellite imagery.

PhD student Kelsey Sanborn has shown how the reef has dealt with environmental stresses in the recent past in order to understand how it might react to climate change in the future. A new study into the recent history of the Great Barrier Reef has shown how it responds to rapid sea-level rise and other environmental stresses.

Mars's huge landslides can move at speeds of up to 360 kilometres an hour for up to tens of kilometres. PhD candidate Giulia Magnarini and Dr Tom Mitchell (UCL Earth Sciences) write about how these landslides may have formed. Some landslides on Mars seem to defy an important law of physics. "Long, runout landslides" are formed by huge volumes of rock and soil moving downslope, largely due to the force of gravity.

Adapted from a news release by UC Berkeley : Fiber-optic cables that constitute a global undersea telecommunications network could one day help scientists study offshore earthquakes and the geologic structures hidden deep beneath the ocean surface. In a recent paper in the journal Science , researchers from UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) , and Rice University describe an experiment that turned 20 kilometers of undersea fiber-optic cable into the equivalent of 10,000 seismic stations along the ocean floor.

The oceans are criss-crossed by telecommunications cables, as illustrated by this graphic predicting the fiber-optic cables that will be operational by 2021, many of them (yellow) owned by private companies like Google and Microsoft. These cables could serve a dual purpose as seismic stations to monitor earthquakes and fault systems over the 70% of Earth covered by water.

Scientists have reconstructed the cooking techniques of the early inhabitants of Puerto Rico by analysing the remains of clams. Led by Philip Staudigel, who conducted the analysis as a graduate student at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Cardiff University, the team has used new chemical analysis techniques to identify the exact cooking temperatures at which clams were cooked over 2500 years ago.

The nitrogen cycle is essential to all forms of life on Earth - nitrogen is a basic building block of DNA. The marine nitrogen cycle is strongly controlled by biology and small changes in the marine nitrogen cycle have major implications on life. It is thought that the marine nitrogen cycle has stayed relatively stable over geological time due to a range of different feedback mechanisms.

Last year, scientists announced that a human jawbone and prehistoric tools found in 2002 in Misliya Cave, on the western edge of Israel, were between 177,000 and 194,000 years old. The finding suggested that modern humans, who originated in Africa, began migrating out of the continent at least 40,000 years earlier than scientists previously thought.