news 2023

In the 1980s, geophysicists made a startling discovery: two continent-sized blobs of unusual material were found deep near the center of the Earth, one beneath the African continent and one beneath the Pacific Ocean. Each blob is twice the size of the Moon and likely composed of different proportions of elements than the mantle surrounding it.

How does Saharan dust remove the powerful greenhouse gas methane from the atmosphere above the Atlantic Ocean? Recently, Utrecht University and other institutes started a research project in collaboration with the shipping industry to answer this question. Once every month, boxes of flasks arrive on the sixth floor of the Buys Ballot building at Utrecht University.

Beachgoers see only the final act: thousands of pounds of brown macroalgae decomposing on shorelines and emitting an odor that smells like rotten eggs. What they miss is the journey that leads to Sargassum seaweed's seasonal sojourn on Caribbean and South Florida coastlines. It's an ocean voyage that starts in an area of the Atlantic between West Africa and the Gulf of Mexico.

A research team led by the Department of Biology at Éniversität Hamburg has discovered, for the first time, the predatory amphipod Rhachotropis abyssalis in 3 different oceans up to 20,000 kilometers apart. In each case, the animals live at depths of more than 3 kilometers. The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports .

Mars's liquid iron core is smaller and denser than previously thought. Not only is it smaller, but it is also surrounded by a layer of molten rock. This is what researchers conclude on the basis of seismic data from the InSight lander. For four years, NASA's InSight lander recorded tremors on Mars with its seismometer.

This year has likely seen the hottest temperatures for 100,000 years. A global team of scientists, including Dr Thomas Newsome from Faculty of Science, has laid out the numbers. A global team of climate scientists has reported that Earth's vital signs have worsened beyond anything humans have seen, to the point that life on Earth is imperilled.

Science, Health & Technology Alex Walls DNA sequencing technique can also help source minerals that are key to the green-energy transition Researchers have identified buried kimberlite, the rocky home of diamonds, by testing the DNA of microbes in the surface soil. These 'biological fingerprints' can reveal what minerals are buried tens of metres below the earth's surface without having to drill.

Both elegant and fierce, killer whales are some of the oceans' top predators, but even they can be exposed to environmental pollution. Now, in the largest study to date on North Atlantic killer whales, researchers in the American Chemical Society' Environmental Science & Technology report the levels of legacy and emerging pollutants in 162 individuals' blubber.

Researchers have shown how the principles of rogue waves - huge 30-metre waves that arise unexpectedly in the ocean - can be applied on a nano scale, with dozens of applications from medicine to manufacturing. Long considered to be a myth, rogue waves strike from comparably calm surroundings, smashing oil rigs and ships in their path.

Climate research: New findings on temperature tipping points Climate researchers around the world are sounding the alarm about exceeding critical temperature values on the Earth. If temperatures pass what are called tipping points, the results could be catastrophic. An international team of researchers, including members from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has now demonstrated in simulations that the temperature tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet can be exceeded in certain cases for a short time, as long as extreme countermeasures are taken afterwards.

Since the 1980s, researchers have observed significant periods of unrest in a region of California's Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains characterized by swarms of earthquakes as well as the ground inflating and rising by almost half an inch per year during these periods. The activity is concerning because the area, called the Long Valley Caldera, sits atop a massive dormant supervolcano.

Scientists have developed an unprecedented simulation that allows the last 120,000 years of glacier evolution in the Alps to be visualized in 80 seconds.

MIT scientists find the sounds beneath our feet are fingerprints of rock stability. If you could sink through the Earth's crust, you might hear, with a carefully tuned ear, a cacophany of booms and crackles along the way. The fissures, pores, and defects running through rocks are like strings that resonate when pressed and stressed.

New research offers a theory on how gold, platinum, and other precious metals found their way to shallow pockets within Earth's mantle. Scientists at Yale and the Southwest Research Institute (SRI) say they-ve hit the jackpot with some valuable new information about the story of gold. It's a story that begins with violent collisions of large objects in space, continues in a half-melted region of Earth's mantle, and ends with precious metals finding an unlikely resting spot much closer to the planet's surface than scientists would have predicted.

Using a new analysis method for satellite images, an international research team, coordinated by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and INRAE, mapped for the first time annual changes in global forest biomass between 2010 and 2019. Researchers discovered that boreal and temperate forests have become the main global carbon sinks.

They were formed on the Moon more than three billion years ago, brought back to the Earth about 50 years ago, and recently arrived on the campus of the University of Bayreuth: samples of Moon rocks collected by NASA Apollo missions 16 and 17. The US national space agency has made them available to the Bavarian Research Institute of Experimental Geochemistry and Geophysics (BGI) of the University of Bayreuth for scientific investigations.

The six-wheeled geologist spotted the twister as part of an atmospheric exploration of Jezero Crater. The lower portion of a Martian dust devil was captured moving along the western rim of Mars' Jezero Crater by NASA's Perseverance rover on Aug. 30, 2023, the 899th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

Biodiversity is greatest in the tropics. That fact that it is hot and humid there plays an important role. However, climate alone cannot explain the global biodiversity patterns well. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research have now tackled this old problem from a completely different angle - and identified a new, doubly important reason for high tropical diversity.

Complex interplay between stellar activity and exoplanet characteristics revealed in study co-authored by McGill Professor Nicolas Cowan A team of astronomers has made a leap forward in our understanding of the intriguing TRAPPIST-1 exoplanetary system. Not only has their research shed light on the nature of TRAPPIST-1 b, the exoplanet orbiting closest to the system's star, but it has also shown the importance of parent stars when studying exoplanets.

An extraordinary heat wave is assailing the world's oceans with an intensity that is surprising climate researchers. Environmental physicist Nicolas Gruber provides some context. Record temperatures in the Mediterranean. Huge heat wave in the North Atlantic. The temperature of the oceans at an all-time high.