news 2022

With the help of artificial intelligence, an international research team led by ETH Zurich has explored the Moon's permanently shadowed regions. The information they have obtained about the area's surface properties will help to identify suitable locations for future lunar missions. It was 1972 when the last humans landed on the Moon.

Key takeaways: Roving the Red Planet. NASA's Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021 and has been gathering data on the planet's geology and climate and searching for signs of ancient life. What lies beneath. The rover's subsurface radar experiment, co-led by UCLA's David Paige, has returned images showing unexpected variations in rock layers beneath the Jezero crater.

On February 21, 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero Crater on Mars. In October 1 , the rover confirmed the importance of its landing site, showing that Jezero Crater really was the site of a lake 3.6 billion years ago. Perseverance's geological discoveries in the crater's floor are described in four papers published on August 25, 2022 in Science and Science Advances .

The Perseverance Mars rover took this selfie on Sept. 10, 2021 - sol 198 of the mission - in Jezero Crater after coring into a rock called 'Rochette.' Rock core samples from the floor of the crater will be brought back to Earth and analyzed to characterize the planet's geology and past climate. The rover used a camera called WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) on the end of its seven-foot-long (two-meter) robotic arm to take the selfie.

New Curtin research has found evidence that Earth's early continents resulted from being hit by comets as our Solar System passed into and out of the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, turning traditional thinking about our planet's formation on its head. The new research, published in Geology , challenges the existing theory that Earth's crust was solely formed by processes inside our planet, casting a new light on the formative history of Earth and our place in the cosmos.

Hurricane Hunter aircraft had never flown this far east-the Cape Verde archipelago just off the western coast of Africa, 3,800 miles from their homebase in Lakeland, Florida. But in early August, one of the aircraft, a modified Gulfstream IV jet operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and outfitted with a suite of advanced monitoring equipment, deployed to the chain of islands for the first time ever, allowing a team of scientists onboard to study a region known as the nursery grounds for some of the Atlantic's most ferocious storms.

Researchers at ETH Zurich and WSL have for the first time reconstructed the extent of Switzerland's glacier ice loss in the 20th century. For this purpose, the researchers used historical imagery and conclude that the country's glaciers lost half their volume between 1931 and 2016. Glaciers are melting rapidly - and since the 2000s, scientists have been recording and researching changes in their volume more and more precisely.

New research reveals more about the magnitude of January eruption, as researchers call for better preparedness The eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha-apai volcano in January created an initial wave 90 metres high - almost the height of the Statue of Liberty (93m) University of Bath tsunami expert calls for better warning systems to detect volcanic eruptions, saying systems are 30 years behind comparable earthquake detection tools The initial t

Until now, it has been assumed that the oxygenation of the oceans over geological timescales has mainly been driven by atmospheric oxygen levels. However, a new study published in Nature June 27 2022   suggests otherwise. Work by scientists at the Biogeosciences Laboratory (CNRS/UBFC), together with their colleagues at the University of California's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, shows that the movement of tectonic plates has probably contributed to ocean oxygenation.

An international team of researchers has discovered groundwater that is more than a billion years old deep below Earth's surface - only the  second time such a discovery has been made. The water, which is 1.2 billion years old, was recovered from a goldand uranium-producing mine in Moab Khotsong, South Africa, confirming that groundwater of such a vintage is more abundant than previously thought.

New Curtin research has provided the strongest evidence yet that Earth's continents were formed by giant meteorite impacts that were particularly prevalent during the first billion years or so of our planet's four-and-a-half-billion year history. Dr Tim Johnson, from Curtin's  School of Earth and Planetary Sciences , said the idea that the continents originally formed at sites of giant meteorite impacts had been around for decades, but until now there was little solid evidence to support the theory.

As an additive in toothpaste, it protects our teeth from decay. But when fluoride occurs in nature in larger quantities and accumulates in groundwater, it can become a hazard for our health. For the first time, scientists have produced a detailed map of global fluoride contamination in groundwater and shown which regions of the world are particularly affected.

Website presents details on state's continually changing coastline The first study to analyze California's coastal cliff retreat statewide using high-resolution data has found that cliffs receded faster in the north than elsewhere in the state during the study period. But the study, which covered 866 kilometers (538 miles) of cliffs, detected erosional hotspots in central and Southern California as well.

Patterns associated with wildfires increasing in frequency; those linked to "normal" rainfall decreasing A team led by Kristen Guirguis, a climate researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, found evidence that the risk of hazardous weather is increasing in the Southwest. The researchers investigated the daily relationships among four major modes of weather affecting California.

Researchers from ETH Zurich discover the first definitive proof that the Moon inherited indigenous noble gases from the Earth's mantle. The discovery represents a significant piece of the puzzle towards understanding how the Moon and, potentially, the Earth and other celestial bodies were formed. Humankind has maintained an enduring fascination with the Moon.

The worst effects of global warming on the world's largest ice sheet could be avoided if nations around the world succeed in meeting climate targets outlined in the Paris Agreement. That's the call from an international team of climate scientists, including experts from The Australian National University (ANU) and the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science (ACEAS), who have examined how much sea levels could rise if climate change melts the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS).

Study: A sauropod from the Lower Jurassic La Quinta formation (Dept. Cesar, Colombia) and the initial diversification of eusauropods at low latitudes A medium-sized sauropod dinosaur inhabited the tropical lowland forested area of the Serranía del Perijá in northern Colombia approximately 175 million years ago, according to a new study by an international team of researchers published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

New research suggests that super-eruptions occur when huge accumulations of magma deep in the Earth's crust, formed over millions of years, move rapidly to the surface, disrupting pre-existing rock. Researchers from the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) and the University of Bristol led an international team of scientists to make the discovery using a model for crustal flow.

Satellite data affords researchers a new method for quantifying carbon mobilisation in Arctic permafrost. Their findings also reveal how summer heatwaves accelerate the rate of Arctic landslides in thawing permafrost. In the northernmost region of the earth the arctic permafrost is melting at an accelerated rate.

An international team of researchers, including scientists from Freie Universität Berlin, publish a new study Scientists from Freie Universität Berlin, University of Bristol, Northwest University Xi'an, and the Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have published the results of a new determination of the crystallization age of 4566.6 ± 0.6 million years for a meteorite called Erg Chech 002 (EC 002).