Sea-levels are rising 60 per cent faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) central projections, new research suggests.
While temperature rises appear to be consistent with the projections made in the IPCC's fourth assessment report (AR4), satellite measurements show that sea-levels are actually rising at a rate of 3.2 mm a year compared to the best estimate of 2 mm a year in the report.
That sea level is rising faster than expected could mean that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) sea-level rise projections for the future may be biased low as well, their results suggest.
Sea-level rise potentially affects millions of people all around the world in coastal areas as well as megacities like Tokyo.
Boulder, Colo., USA – GSA Bulletin articles posted online between 2 October and 21 November span locations such as the San Andreas fault, California; Tibet; Mongolia; Maine; the Owyhee River, Oregon; the Afar Rift, Ethiopia; Wyoming; Argentina; the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt; British Columbia; the southern Rocky Mountains; Scandinavia; and Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Topics include the "big crisis" in the history of life on Earth; the structural geology of Mount St. Helens; and the evolution of a piggyback basin.
Now, Helmholtz Centre Berlin's Dr. Andrei Varykhalov, Prof. Dr. Oliver Rader and his team of physicists has taken the first step towards building graphene-based components, in collaboration with physicists from St. Petersburg (Russia), Jülich (Germany) and Harvard (USA). According to their report on 27. November 2012 in Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2227), they successfully managed to increase the graphene conduction electrons' spin-orbit coupling by a factor of 10,000 – enough to allow them to construct a switch that can be controlled via small electric fields.
HOUSTON – (Nov. 27, 2012) – A seamless graphene/nanotube hybrid created at Rice University may be the best electrode interface material possible for many energy storage and electronics applications.
Led by Rice chemist James Tour, researchers have successfully grown forests of carbon nanotubes that rise quickly from sheets of graphene to astounding lengths of up to 120 microns, according to a paper published today by Nature Communications. A house on an average plot with the same aspect ratio would rise into space.
The thickest layers of global smog — caused by traffic, industry, and natural minerals, among other factors — are found over the world's megacities. But getting an accurate measurement of pollution is no easy task. On-the-ground monitoring stations do not always provide the most accurate picture —monitoring stations depend heavily on local positioning and some cities put stations in urban centers, while others build on the edge of a city.
Uncertainty about how much the climate is changing is not a reason to delay preparing for the harmful impacts of climate change says Professor Jim Hall of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and colleagues at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, writing today in Nature Climate Change.
The effects of storm surge and sea-level rise have become topics of everyday conversation in the days and weeks following Hurricane Sandy's catastrophic landfall along the mid-Atlantic coast.
Ongoing research by professor John Brubaker of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science is throwing light on another, less-familiar component of sea-level variability—the "intra-seasonal" changes that occupy the middle ground between rapid, storm-related surges in sea level and the long-term increase in sea level due to global climate change.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories' one-of-a-kind multiphase shock tube began with a hallway conversation that led to what engineer Justin Wagner describes as the only shock tube in the world that can look at how shock waves interact with dense particle fields.
The machine is considered multiphase because it can study shock wave propagation through a mixture of gas and solid particles.
Fairbanks, Alaska—University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Vladimir Romanovsky is one of four scientists who authored a report released today by the United Nations Environmental Programme.
The wetting model is a classical problem in surface science and biomimetic science. Professor LIU Jianlin and his collaborators from China University of Petroleum, Wuhan University and Fourth Military Medical University approached this old and classical problem from a new direction. They stressed that it is the triple contact line and not the contact area of the droplet/solid interface that determines the macroscopic contact angle.
The stems of shrubs have given researchers a window into a glacier's past, potentially allowing them to more accurately assess how they're set to change in the future.
Their findings have been published today, 27 November, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, and show how a glacier's history of melting can be extended way past the instrumental record.
RENO – This week a pioneering study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and co-authored by Dr. Alison Murray and Dr. Christian Fritsen of Nevada's Desert Research Institute (DRI) reveals, for the first time, a viable community of bacteria that survives and ekes out a living in a dark, salty and subfreezing environment beneath nearly 20 meters of ice in one of Antarctica's most isolated lakes.
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A new University at Buffalo study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters examines maar craters, which resemble the bowl-like cavities formed by meteorites but are in some ways more mysterious.
Scientists often can discern pertinent details about meteorites -- when they struck, how large they were, the angle they approached Earth and other information -- by measuring the diameter and volume of the impact crater.
Cambridge, Mass. - November 26, 2012 - Now you see it, now you don't.
A new device invented at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) can absorb 99.75% of infrared light that shines on it. When activated, it appears black to infrared cameras.
Composed of just a 180-nanometer-thick layer of vanadium dioxide (VO2) on top of a sheet of sapphire, the device reacts to temperature changes by reflecting dramatically more or less infrared light.