"The shape of the bedforms that make up the barrier system did not change a whole lot," said co-Principal Investigator (PI) John Goff of the Institute for Geophysics. "Where we might have expected to see significant erosion based on long-term history, not a lot happened — nothing that ate into the shoreface."
"The sand largely took the blow," added co-PI Jamie Austin of the Institute for Geophysics. "Like a good barricade, the barrier system absorbed the significant blow, but held."
A groundbreaking study by Harvard University's Harvard Forest and the Smithsonian Institution reveals that, if left unchecked, recent trends in the loss of forests to development will undermine significant land conservation gains in Massachusetts, jeopardize water quality, and limit the natural landscape's ability to protect against climate change.
Physicists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics measure the duration of energetic electron pulses using laser fields.
Rivers and streams release carbon dioxide at a rate five times greater than the world's lakes and reservoirs combined, contrary to common belief.
Research from the University of Waterloo was a key component of the international study, the findings of which appear in a recent issue of the journal Nature.
Scientists from U of T's Department of Chemistry have discovered a novel chemical lurking in the atmosphere that appears to be a long-lived greenhouse gas (LLGHG). The chemical – perfluorotributylamine (PFTBA) – is the most radiatively efficient chemical found to date, breaking all other chemical records for its potential to impact climate.
Radiative efficiency describes how effectively a molecule can affect climate. This value is then multiplied by its atmospheric concentration to determine the total climate impact.
Traditional plastics, or polymers, are electrical insulators. In the seventies a new class of polymers that conduct electricity like semiconductors and metals was discovered by Alan J.Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa. This was the motivation for their Nobel Prize in Chemistry year 2000. Now Xavier Crispin, Docent in organic electronics at Linköping University's Department of Science and Technology, has led a project where no fewer than twenty researchers from five universities worldwide have collaborated to prove that polymers can also be semimetals.
Students may soon be able to reach out and touch some of the theoretical concepts they are taught in their physics classes thanks to a novel idea devised by a group of researchers from Imperial College London.
In new study published today, 9 December, in the journal EPL, the researchers have successfully demonstrated how complex theoretical physics can be transformed into a physical object using a 3D printer.
The energy needed to change the magnetic orientation of a single atom – which determines its magnetic stability and therefore its usefulness in a variety of future device applications – can be modified by varying the atom's electrical coupling to nearby metals.
In a recent study, large numbers of bryozoan and other typical marine fossils were discovered for the first time in the thick limestone layers and lenses of the upper part of the Linxi Formation of the Guandi section, Linxi County, eastern Inner Mongolia. These marine fossils provide the first evidence for the Xingmeng area being in a marine or mainly marine environment at the end of the later part of the late Permian.
An abandoned mineral mine near Stanford University is providing geoscientists new insights on how to permanently entomb greenhouse gas emissions in the Earth.
For two years, a team of Stanford researchers has been trying to unravel a geological mystery at the Red Mountain mine about 70 miles east of the campus. The abandoned mine contains some of the world's largest veins of pure magnesium carbonate, or magnesite – a chalky mineral made of carbon dioxide (CO2) and magnesium. How the magnesite veins formed millions of years ago has long been a puzzle.
Popular television shows such as "Doctor Who" have brought the idea of time travel into the vernacular of popular culture. But problem of time travel is even more complicated than one might think. LSU's Mark Wilde has shown that it would theoretically be possible for time travelers to copy quantum data from the past.
SAN FRANCISCO – Scientists from the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will present a variety of their research at the 2013 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, which runs Monday, Dec. 9 through Friday, Dec. 13 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. Among the noteworthy PNNL research scheduled to be discussed are carbon sequestration in empty shale reservoirs, water needs for future energy production and how soil microbes adjust to climate change. More information is below.
For the first time, scientists have measured the frictional heat produced by the fault slip during an earthquake. Their results, published December 5 in Science, show that friction on the fault was remarkably low during the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake that struck off the coast of Japan in March 2011 and triggered a devastating tsunami.
The devastating tsunami that struck Japan's Tohoku region in March 2011 was touched off by a submarine earthquake far more massive than anything geologists had expected in that zone.
Now, a team of scientists including McGill University geologist Christie Rowe, has published a set of studies in the journal Science that shed light on what caused the dramatic displacement of the seafloor off the northeastern coast of Japan. The findings also suggest that other zones in the northwest Pacific may be at risk of similar huge earthquakes.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – An international team of scientists that installed a borehole temperature observatory following the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake in Japan has been able to measure the "frictional heat" generated during the rupture of the fault – an amount the researchers say was smaller than expected, which means the fault is more slippery than previously thought.
It is the first time scientists have been able to use precise temperature measurements to calculate the friction dynamics of fault slip.