The Earth explorer satellite GOCE (Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer), built by the European Space Agency ESA, was successfully launched today at 15:21 GMT from the Russian Cosmodrome Plesetsk. GOCE is the first satellite mission within the framework of the Living Planet Programme of ESA and will map Earth’s gravity field in [...]
Latest Earth News
Any Minute Now for Alaska's Mount Redoubt
Top vent in the Redoubt summit crater. Picture Date: March 21, 2009–Image Creator: Read, Cyrus; Image courtesy of AVO/USGS.
Alaska’s Mount Redoubt Volcano is grumbling again, seven weeks after renewed activity there put the seismic hot spot back on the radar and into the headlines.
Back in February, scientists said the boiling mountain would blow its [...]
Atomic fountain clocks are becoming still more stable
They are at present the most accurate clocks in...
West Antarctic ice comes and goes, rapidly
Modeled Antarctic ice sheet at particular times through the...
Bird-brain Dinosaurs Stumbled into Death Trap
Two juvenile skeletons of the ostrich-mimic dinosaur Sinornithomimus died...
Mighty diatoms: Global climate feedback from microscopic algae
This is Michigan State University zoology professor Elena Litchman.Credit:...
Recent Earth News :
Climate change may widen gap between rich and poor, study finds
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–A rising tide is said to lift all boats. Rising global temperatures, however, may lead to increased disparities between rich and poor countries, according to a recent MIT economic analysis of the impact of climate change on growth.
After examining worldwide climate and economic data [...]
Fast climate change on the Antarctic Peninsula has affected the base of the food chain.
Credit: Zina Deretsky / NSF
Scientists have long established that the Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most rapidly warming spots on Earth. Now, new research using detailed satellite data indicates that the changing climate is affecting not just the penguins at [...]
MADISON, WI, MARCH 16, 2009–Throughout the world, nitrogen compounds are released to the atmosphere from agricultural activities and combustion of fossil fuels. These pollutants are deposited to ecosystems as precipitation, gases, and particles, sometimes many hundreds of miles downwind of their release point. The Catskill Mountains of southeastern New York are a case in point—though [...]
Madison, WI, March 16, 2009 — One of the most significant developments in agricultural growth in modern times has been the continuous and substantial increase in corn yield over the past 80 years in the U.S. Corn Belt.
This extraordinary yield advance has been associated with both breeding of improved hybrids and the ability to [...]
Nyiragongo, an active African volcano, possesses lava unlike any other in the world, which may point toward its source being a new mantle plume says a University of Rochester geochemist. The lava composition indicates that a mantle plume—an upwelling of intense heat from near the core of the Earth—may be bubbling to life beneath the [...]
A study published today online in The Lancet (March 13, 2009) presented two year data for the bioabsorbable everolimus coronary stent. Commenting on the results, interventional cardiology specialist, Professor Franz Eberli from the University Hospital Zurich (Switzerland) and official spokesperson for the European Society of Cardiology, said:
“In addition to the ABSORB study presenting the longest [...]
This map shows areas damaged by the Dec. 16, 1811, magnitude 7.2 earthquake. That earthquake was the first of three major temblors along the New Madrid fault in 1811 and 1812.
Credit: (Image courtesy of Seth Stein, based on results by Susan Hough)
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The New Madrid fault system does not behave as earthquake [...]