Earth

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — New information about lightning-emitted X-rays, gamma rays and high-energy electrons during thunderstorms is prompting scientists to raise concerns about the potential for airline passengers and crews to be exposed to harmful levels of radiation.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - There is more to the snowflake than its ability to delight schoolchildren and snarl traffic.

The structure of the frosty flakes also fascinate ice chemists like Purdue University's Travis Knepp, a doctoral candidate in analytical chemistry who studies the basics of snowflake structure to gain more insight into the dynamics of ground-level, or "tropospheric," ozone depletion in the Arctic.

New high-energy particle research by a team working with data from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory further heightens the uncertainty about the exact nature of a key theoretical component of modern physics — the massive fundamental particle called the Higgs boson.

Very often in science, the unexpected discovery turns out to be the most significant. Rice University Professor Junichiro Kono and his team weren't looking for a breakthrough in the transmission of terahertz signals, but there it was: a plasmonic material that would, with adjustments to its temperature and/or magnetic field, either stop a terahertz beam cold or let it pass completely.

In the long term, the Earth's temperature may be 30-50% more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than has previously been estimated, reports a new study published in Nature Geoscience this week.

The results show that components of the Earth's climate system that vary over long timescales – such as land-ice and vegetation – have an important effect on this temperature sensitivity, but these factors are often neglected in current climate models.

Some atoms don't always follow the rules.

Take the beryllium dimer, a seemingly simple molecule made up of two atoms that University of Delaware physicists Krzysztof Szalewicz and Konrad Patkowski and colleague Vladimír Spirko of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic report on in the Dec. 4 edition of the journal Science.

A new study by an international research team has opened up a window into the earth to reveal Hawaii's deep roots and the best picture yet of a plume originating from the lower mantle. The findings suggest that the Hawaiian hot spot is the result of an upwelling high-temperature plume from the lower mantle.

December 4, 2009 -- Most earthquakes occur along fault lines, which form boundaries between two tectonic plates. As the relative speed of the plates around a fault increases, is there a corresponding increase in the number of earthquakes produced along the fault? According to this study published in the December issue of BSSA, the answer depends upon the type of tectonic boundary. On certain types of boundary, the efficiency of earthquake production actually depends on the fault slip rate.

MADISON — The rising level of atmospheric carbon dioxide may be fueling more than climate change. It could also be making some trees grow like crazy.

The third in a series of papers in the journal Nature completes the case for a new method of predicting earthquakes.

The forecasting model developed by Danijel Schorlemmer, of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, aims to predict the rough size and location of future quakes. Testing of the model is underway.

While the timing of quakes remains unpredictable, progress on two out of three key questions is significant in the hard discipline of earthquake forecasting.

Source:

A new article in the December 4 issue of Science addresses how the combined efforts of government commitments and market transition could save forest and reduce carbon emissions in Brazil. The Policy Forum brief, entitled "The End of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon" was authored by contributors from the Woods Hole Research Center, Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia (IPAM), Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Aliança da Terra, Environmental Defense Fund, University of Florida, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, and the Universidade Federal do Pará.

An international team of scientists led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) has developed a new method of measuring the absorption of CO2 by the oceans and mapped for the first time CO2 uptake for the entire North Atlantic.

Published tomorrow in the journal Science, the peer-reviewed study will greatly improve our understanding of the natural ocean 'sinks' and enable more accurate predictions about how the global climate is changing.

Washington, D.C.—Hawaii may be paradise for vacationers, but for geologists it has long been a puzzle. Plate tectonic theory readily explains the existence of volcanoes at boundaries where plates split apart or collide, but mid-plate volcanoes such as those that built the Hawaiian island chain have been harder to fit into the theory. A classic explanation, proposed nearly 40 years ago, has been that magma is supplied to the volcanoes from upwellings of hot rock, called mantle "plumes," that originate deep in the Earth's mantle. Evidence for these deep structures has been sketchy, however.

Rising levels of carbon dioxide may overheat the planet and cause other environmental problems, but fears that rising CO2 levels could directly reduce plant biodiversity can be allayed, according to a new study by a University of Minnesota scientist Peter Reich. In fact, rising CO2 may actually help counteract losses of diversity from another environmental villain: the global rain of nitrogen from fertilizers and exhaust fumes.