Competition in the quantum world

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Cracking the ice code

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What happened the last time a vegetated Earth shifted from an extremely cold climate to desert-like conditions? And what does it tell us about climate change today?

John Isbell is on a quest to coax that information from the geology of the southernmost portions of the Earth. It won't be easy, because the last transition from "icehouse to greenhouse" occurred between 335 and 290 million years ago.

Sea level influenced tropical climate during the last ice age

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Scientists look at past climates to learn about climate change and the ability to simulate it with computer models. One region that has received a great deal of attention is the Indo-Pacific warm pool, the vast pool of warm water stretching along the equator from Africa to the western Pacific Ocean.

Kinks and curves at the nanoscale

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One of the basic principles of nanotechnology is that when you make things extremely small—one nanometer is about five atoms wide, 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair—they are going to become more perfect.

"Perfect in the sense that their arrangement of atoms in the real world will become more like an idealized model," says University of Vermont engineer Frederic Sansoz, "with smaller crystals—in for example, gold or copper—it's easier to have fewer defects in them."

Slow earthquakes: It's all in the rock mechanics

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Earthquakes that last minutes rather than seconds are a relatively recent discovery, according to an international team of seismologists. Researchers have been aware of these slow earthquakes, only for the past five to 10 years because of new tools and new observations, but these tools may explain the triggering of some normal earthquakes and could help in earthquake prediction.

Testing the snowball Earth hypothesis for the Ediacaran

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Earth experienced ultimately cold climates several times in its history, such as glaciers reaching the tropical latitudes, and the ocean probably stayed completely frozen. This type of climate stage is known as snowball Earth.

Siberia was once tropical during the Ediacaran period about 580-570 million years ago, yet it was glaciated.

Palinspastic reconstruction of Cenozoic deformation across the Himachal Himalaya

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This study offers the first geometrically rigorous reconstruction of deformation in response to the India-Asia collision across a key portion of the western Himalaya.

The reconstruction demonstrates the viability of important concepts pertaining to the dynamic evolution of crustal-scale contractional systems.

First, despite variations in erosion and exhumation, the crystalline cores of mountain belts may be emplaced at depth.

Why we need to put the fish back into fisheries

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Overfishing has reduced fish populations and biodiversity across much of the world's oceans. In response, fisheries are increasingly reliant on a handful of highly valuable shellfish. However, new research by the University of York shows this approach to be extremely risky.

Scientists explore roots of future tropical rainfall

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How will rainfall patterns across the tropical Indian and Pacific regions change in a future warming world? Climate models generally suggest that the tropics as a whole will get wetter, but the models don't always agree on where rainfall patterns will shift in particular regions within the tropics.

A new study, published online May 19 in the journal Nature Geoscience, looks to the past to learn about the future of tropical climate change, and our ability to simulate it with numerical models.

A reappraisal of the early slip history of the San Andreas fault

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The San Andreas fault system forms the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates in California (United States).

Researchers agree that this plate boundary developed about 27 million years ago and that about 315 km of horizontal offset has occurred in the Neogene period (23 million years ago to the present day).

Researchers also think that the San Andreas fault was inactive between about 23 and 50 million years ago, based on the correlation of two sandstone formations that were deposited in a deep-ocean basin about 40 million years ago.