news 2020

Ice calving from the front of Thurston Island off of western Antarctica on Nov. The image was taken as part of NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne science mission to study Earth's polar ice. Photo by NASA/Jim Yungel A new study suggests the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet is less stable than researchers once thought.

Researchers at EPFL and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) have found that the temperature of Swiss rivers is rising steadily. This situation is straining ecosystems and could limit the use of this water in Switzerland's nuclear and hydropower industries. For a long time, meltwater from snow and glaciers has limited the warming of the Swiss rivers, allowing them to maintain a relatively low temperature throughout the year.

An exhibit at the University of Chicago Library this winter contains a wooden baseball bat worn flat on one side, next to a bag of rocks collected from the slopes of a Japanese volcano. The bat belonged to UChicago geoscientist Prof. Alfred T. Anderson, Jr. "Fred found that was the perfect tool for smashing rock samples," said his colleague Prof. Andy Davis.

An exhibit at the University of Chicago Library this winter contains a wooden baseball bat worn flat on one side, next to a bag of rocks collected from the slopes of a Japanese volcano. The bat belonged to UChicago geoscientist Prof. Alfred T. Anderson. "He found that was the perfect tool for smashing rock samples," said his colleague Prof. Andy Davis.

By analyzing more than two decades of data in the western U.S., scientists have shown that flood sizes increase exponentially as a higher fraction of precipitation falls as rain, offering insight into how flood risks may change in a warming world with less snow. As the world warms and precipitation that would have generated snowpack instead creates rain, the western U.S. could see larger floods, according to new Stanford research.

New evidence has confirmed Australia's Yarrabubba crater as the world's oldest preserved impact structure - but did it thaw Earth and end an ice age? The crater is regarded as one of Earth's oldest, but until now has lacked a precise age. Now, a new study has used geological dating to pin the impact to 2.229 billion years ago - a time that coincided with Earth's recovery from an ice age known as ' Snowball Earth ', where most of Earth's surface was covered with ice sheets between two and five kilometres thick.

About 800,000 years ago, the giant straight-tusked elephant Palaeoloxodon migrated out of Africa and became widespread across Europe and Asia. It divided into many species, with distinct types in Japan, Central Asia and Europe — even some dwarf forms as large as a small donkey on some Mediterranean islands.

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Researchers disprove theory of volcanic eruption as reason for mass deaths / Mineralogists and planetologists of the University of Münster participating in worldwide study in "Science' Was it volcanic eruptions in western India or an asteroid impact that caused the death of dinosaurs and many other animal species 66 million years ago? Researchers have been discussing this since the 1980s.

Volcanic activity did not play a direct role in the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, according to an international, Yale-led team of researchers. It was all about the asteroid.

Researchers at EPFL have developed a new model to calculate hydraulic fracture propagation. Acclaimed for its accuracy by experts, the model better predicts fracture geometry and the energy cost of hydraulic fracturing - a widely used technique in areas such as CO2 storage, hydrocarbon extraction, dams and volcano hazard monitoring.

Volcanic activity did not play a direct role in the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs and about 75 per cent of Earth's species 66 million years ago, according to a team involving UCL and University of Southampton researchers.

Understanding how deep-ocean metals remain uncovered on the open sea floor could help geoscientists provide advice to the mining industry. Lumps of rare metallic elements on the deep-ocean floor strangely remain uncovered despite the shifting sands and sediment many leagues under the sea. Scientists now think they know why - and it could have important implications for mining these metals while preserving the strange fauna at the bottom of the ocean.

A UNIGE researcher has discovered the particularities of porphyry copper and gold deposits, providing mining companies with a new tool to maximise the extraction of these two metals. Why are some porphyry deposits - formed by magmatic fluids in volcanic arcs - rich in copper while others primarily contain gold? In an attempt to answer this question, a researcher from the University of Geneva investigated how the metals are accumulated over the time duration of a mineralizing event, looking for a correlation between the amounts of copper and gold extracted from the deposits.

During this period, known as the middle Miocene Climate Optimum, global temperatures were as much as 3 to 4 degrees warmer than today's average temperatures, similar to estimates for 2100. The position of the continents were similar to today and the seas were flourishing with life. This period, which occurred between 15 and 17 million years ago, has puzzled geologists for decades as they have tried to explain the initial cause of the global warming and the environmental conditions that existed on Earth afterwards.

It is well-established that biodiverse ecosystems generally function better than monocultures. Ecologists at the University of Zurich have now shown that the same is true on a larger scale: Having a mix of different land-covers including grassland, forest, urban areas and water bodies improves the functioning and stability of a landscape - irrespective of the plant species diversity, region and climate.

Researchers at EPFL and the Swiss Federal Office of Energy have devised strategies for reducing the earthquake risk associated with geothermal energy, CO2 storage and other human activities happening deep underground. Although most earthquakes are attributable to natural causes, some are triggered - directly or indirectly - by human activity.

Plate tectonics and mantle plumes set the lifespan of volcanic islands like Hawaii and the Galapagos. Listen When a hot plume of rock rises through the Earth's mantle to puncture the overlying crust, it can create not only a volcanic ocean island, but also a swell in the ocean floor hundreds to thousands of kilometers long.