Earth

The remnants from Typhoon Vamco are sweeping over Alaska's Aleutian Island chain today and tomorrow, and high wind warnings have been posted by the National Weather Service.

More than 30 years of monsoon data from India showed that ground moisture where the storms make landfall is a major indicator of what the storm will do from there. If the ground is wet, the storm is likely to sustain, while dry conditions should calm the storm.

South of Hawaii, Hilda is holding on to tropical storm force winds, and continues to head south of the Islands. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite noticed some moderate rainfall in Hilda's center earlier today, but the storm is staying far enough away from Hawaii to not cause trouble for travelers and vacationers.

New research announced at the International Water in a Changing Climate Science Conference in Melbourne 24-28 August, implicates pollution from Asia, Europe and North America as a contributor to recent Australian rainfall changes. Australian scientists using a climate model that includes a treatment of tiny particles – or aerosols – report that the build up of these particles in the northern hemisphere affects their simulation of recent climate change in the southern hemisphere, including rainfall in Australia.

New Haven, Conn.—Known for their wide variety of vibrant plumage, birds have evolved various chemical and physical mechanisms to produce these beautiful colors over millions of years. A team of paleontologists and ornithologists led by Yale University has now discovered evidence of vivid iridescent colors in feather fossils more than 40 million years old.

The finding, published online August 26 in Biology Letters, signifies the first evidence of a preserved color-producing nanostructure in a fossilized feather.

Warmer ocean temperatures could mean dramatic shifts in the structure of underwater food webs and the abundance of marine life, according to a new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Until now, little has been known about how changes in temperatures might affect the total productivity and growth of all marine consumers (such as animals, fungi and bacteria) relative to their prey (including algae and plants).

From mid July to early August 2006, a heat wave swept through the southwestern United States. Temperature records were broken at many locations and unusually high humidity levels for this typically arid region led to the deaths of more than 600 people, 25,000 cattle and 70,000 poultry in California alone.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– New research by scientists at UC Santa Barbara indicates a possible Antarctic location for ice that seemed to be missing at a key point in climate history 34 million years ago. The research, which has important implications for climate change, is described in a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Tropical lizards detect the effects of global warming in a climate where the smallest change makes a big difference, according to herpetologist Laurie Vitt, curator of reptiles and George Lynn Cross Research Professor at the University of Oklahoma's Sam Noble Museum of Natural History. Climate change caused by global warming threatens the very existence of these and other tropical species, the ecosystem and its by-products, Vitt maintains.

The world's last remaining "pristine" forest – the boreal forest across large stretches of Russia, Canada and other northern countries – is under increasing threat, a team of international researchers has found.

The researchers from Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, University of Adelaide in Australia and the National University of Singapore have called for the urgent preservation of existing boreal forests in order to secure biodiversity and prevent the loss of this major global carbon sink.

Scientists said today at the 2nd World Congress of Agroforestry that a type of acacia tree with a growth habit that is virtually unlike all other trees holds particular promise for farmers in Africa as a free source of nitrogen for their soils that could last generations.

Three of the most important crops yields produced in the United States (corn, soybeans, and cotton) are predicted to plummet if temperatures rises due to climate change continue.

Satellites spying on Typhoon Vamco have obtained data confirming that the large storm has a huge eye, about 45 miles in diameter. Like its cousin Hurricane Bill, Vamco is a very stubborn storm system that continues to linger.

Predatory crustaceans of the class Remipedia rely on long antennae which search the lightless deep oceans in all directions. Like some type of science fiction monster, their head is equipped with powerful prehensile limbs and poisonous fangs.

The first season of the international drilling project NEEM (North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling) in north-western Greenland was completed on August 20th. A research team, with the participation of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association, has drilled an ice core of 1,757.87 m length on the Greenland inland ice within 110 days. It is expected to contain data on climate history of about 38,000 years.