In 1991, it was a disaster for the villages nearby the erupting Philippine volcano Pinatubo. But the effects were felt even as far away as Europe. The volcano threw up many tons of ash and other particles into the atmosphere causing less sunlight than usual to reach the Earth's surface. For the first few years after the eruption, global temperatures dropped by half a degree. In general, volcanic eruptions can have a strong short-term impact on climate. Conversely, the idea that climate may also affect volcanic eruptions on a global scale and over long periods of time is completely new.
Earth
Numerous geo-engineering schemes have been suggested as possible ways to reduce levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and so reduce the risk of global warming and climate change. One such technology involves dispersing large quantities of iron salts in the oceans to fertilize otherwise barren parts of the sea and trigger the growth of algal blooms and other photosynthesizing marine life. Photosynthesis requires carbon dioxide as its feedstock and when the algae die they will sink to the bottom of the sea taking the locked in carbon with them.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Brine water that flows back from gas wells in the Marcellus Shale region after hydraulic fracturing is many times more salty than seawater, with high contents of various elements, including radium and barium. The chemistry is consistent with brines formed during the Paleozoic era, a study by an undergraduate student and two professors in Penn State's Department of Geosciences found.
PHILADELPHIA — The field of metamaterials involves augmenting materials with specially designed patterns, enabling those materials to manipulate electromagnetic waves and fields in previously impossible ways. Now, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have come up with a theory for moving this phenomenon onto the quantum scale, laying out blueprints for materials where electrons have nearly zero effective mass.
Such materials could make for faster circuits with novel properties.
This fall, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago and the National Academy of Sciences organized a colloquium that brought together more than 100 cosmologists, particle physicists and observational astrophysicists – three fields now united in the hunt to determine what is dark matter. Their goal: to take stock of the latest theories and findings about dark matter, assess just how close we are to detecting it and spark cross-disciplinary discussions and collaborations aimed at resolving the dark matter puzzle.
So where do things stand?
For several decades antimony electrodes have been used to measure the acidity/basicity – and so to determine the pH value. Unfortunately, they allow for measuring pH changes of solutions only at a certain distance from electrodes or corroding metals. Researchers at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences developed a method for producing antimony microelectrodes that allow for measuring pH changes just over the metal surface, at which chemical reactions take place.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 18, 2012 — For everyone with holiday visions of snowflakes dancing in their heads, the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, today issued a video explaining how dust, water, cold and air currents collaborate to form these symbols of the season. It's all there in an episode of Bytesize Science, the award-winning video series produced by the ACS Office of Public Affairs at www.BytesizeScience.com.
Research carried out at the University of Sheffield has revealed intriguing parallels between modern day and Bronze-Age Syria as the Mesopotamian region underwent urban decline, government collapse, and drought.
Dr Ellery Frahm from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology made the discoveries by studying stone tools of obsidian, razor-sharp volcanic glass, crafted in the region about 4,200 years ago.
ANN ARBOR – A comprehensive map three years in the making is telling the story of humans' impact on the Great Lakes, identifying how "environmental stressors" stretching from Minnesota to Ontario are shaping the future of an ecosystem that contains 20 percent of the world's fresh water.
ITHACA, N.Y. – Global travel and climate warming could be creating the right conditions for outbreaks of a new virus in this country, according to a new Cornell University computer model.
Highlights, including authors and their institutions
The following highlights summarize research papers that have been recentlypublished in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).
In this release:
By fitting a "smart" mobile phone with magnifying optics, bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley created a real "cell" phone, a diagnostic-quality microscope that can be used by clinics in developing countries and inside — and outside — American biology classrooms, according to Eva M. Schmid, PhD, who described the development of CellScope at the American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting, Dec. 17, in San Francisco.
From extreme drought to super storms, many wonder what the future holds for the climate of the eastern United States. A study conducted by researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, does away with the guessing.
Results show the region will be hotter and wetter.
Joshua Fu, a civil and environmental engineering professor, and Yang Gao, a graduate research assistant, developed precise scales of cities which act as a climate crystal ball seeing high resolution climate changes almost 50 years into the future.
In the period of atmospheric nuclear testing in the 1950s and 1960s significant amounts of uranium-236 were distributed world-wide. Despite this, uranium-236 has mostly eluded detection and clear attribution to this source. A team of three researchers based in Austria and Australia lead by Stephan Winkler have identified the bomb-pulse of this isotope in corals from the Caribbean Sea. Uranium is readily dissolved in seawater, and therefore is carried by ocean currents. This makes uranium-236 and ideal tool for investigating ocean currents. Stephan R.
AMHERST, Mass. – Though it seems like an oxymoron, Arctic hurricanes happen, complete with a central "eye," extreme low barometric pressure and towering 30-foot waves that can sink small ships and coat metal platforms with thick ice, threatening oil and gas exploration. Now climate scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and in England report the first conclusive evidence that Arctic hurricanes, also known as polar lows, play a significant role in driving ocean water circulation and climate.