Earth

New research by a team of scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) offers new insight into the San Andreas Fault as it extends beneath Southern California's Salton Sea. The team discovered a series of prominent faults beneath the sea, which transfer motion away from the San Andreas Fault as it disappears beneath the Salton Sea. The study provides new understanding of the intricate earthquake faults system beneath the sea and what role it may play in the earthquake cycle along the southern San Andreas Fault.

OAK RIDGE, July 27, 2009 -- Having outlasted all expectations of its service life, the original mercury target of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science's record-setting neutron science facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is being replaced for the first time.

SNS operators are taking advantage of a planned maintenance outage to replace the old target, which has been in service since the SNS's startup on April 28, 2006.

When the magnitude 8 Sichuan earthquake struck southern China in May 2008, it left more than 69,000 people dead and 4.3 million homeless. Now ecologists have added to these losses an assessment of the earthquake's impact on biodiversity: namely, habitat for some of the last existing wild giant pandas. In an article published today in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment e-view, researchers show that more than 23 percent of the pandas' habitat in the study area was destroyed, and fragmentation of the remaining habitat could hinder panda reproduction.

NOAA-supported scientists, led by Nancy Rabalais, Ph.D., from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON), found the size of this year's Gulf of Mexico dead zone to be smaller than forecasted, measuring 3,000 square miles. However the dead zone, which is usually limited to water just above the sea floor, was severe where it did occur, extending closer to the water surface then in most years.

Fossil coral data and temperature records derived from ice-core measurements have been used to place better constraints on future sea level rise, and to test sea level projections.

The results are published today in Nature Geoscience and predict that the amount of sea level rise by the end of this century will be between 7- 82 cm – depending on the amount of warming that occurs – a figure similar to that projected by the IPCC report of 2007.

Washington, DC—The oil and gas that fuels our homes and cars started out as living organisms that died, were compressed, and heated under heavy layers of sediments in the Earth's crust.

Scientists have debated for years whether some of these hydrocarbons could also have been created deeper in the Earth and formed without organic matter. Now for the first time, scientists have found that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be synthesized under the pressure-temperature conditions of the upper mantle —the layer of Earth under the crust and on top of the core.

GALVESTON, Texas — Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have identified women who are likely to gain weight while using depot medroxyprogesterone acetate, more commonly known as Depo-Provera or the birth control shot. These findings dispel the myth that all women who use DMPA will gain weight and will help physicians to counsel patients appropriately.

In a study published in the July 24 issue of Science, researchers Amy Clement and Robert Burgman from the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and Joel Norris from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego begin to unravel the mystery of how clouds will change as global warming progresses.

A rare April freeze in 2007 provided researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee with further evidence that climate change could have negative effects on stream and forest ecosystems.

Scientists have recorded a decline in winter precipitation over the past 60 years in Spain, and they now forecast that precipitation will also decrease in spring and summer. A team from the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology (CSIC) has studied rainfall data from 1950 to 2006 and the climate projections for coming decades, showing that less rain will fall in future over the Iberian Peninsula. However, precipitation will continue to be more frequent in winter than in spring-summer.

Two areas of thunderstorms in the Caribbean from July 21, are on the move. One area is now moving out of the Caribbean and into the eastern Atlantic Ocean while the other is now moving over the southeastern Bahamas and Hispaniola on a northwest track.

The Geostationary Operational Environmental (GOES) satellite, GOES-12, took another snapshot of the two areas of thunderstorms on Wednesday, July 22. The satellite image shows two comma-like cloud formations, one east of Florida's east coast, and the other with its "tail" over Hispaniola.

LIVERMORE, Calif. - Separating carbon dioxide from its polluting source, such as the flue gas from a coal-fired power plant, may soon become cleaner and more efficient.

A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher has developed a screening method that would use ionic liquids - a special type of molten salt that becomes liquid under the boiling point of water (100 degrees Celsius) - to separate carbon dioxide from its source, making it a cleaner, more viable and stable method than what is currently available.

Now researchers at Yale University and the University of Calgary report in the July 22 issue of Nature's advanced online publication that predator-prey interactions are the "conductors" of synchronicity in living organisms.

"Change these interactions and you can suffer disastrous consequences to these systems," said David Vasseur, co-author of the paper and assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale.

Measurements with ytterbium-174, an isotope with 70 protons and 104 neutrons, have shown the largest effects of parity violation in an atom ever observed – a hundred times larger than the most precise measurements made so far, with the element cesium.

"Parity" assumes that, on the atomic scale, nature behaves identically when left and right are reversed. In other words, interactions that are otherwise the same but whose spatial configurations are switched, as if seen in a mirror, ought to be indistinguishable. Sounds like common sense but, remarkably, this isn't always the case.

The three-spine stickleback is a tiny fish that thrives in oceans and in fresh water might appear to be the same. Ecologists, however, are finding that they are actually a diverse collection of very specialized individuals.

Population and Community Ecology Consequences of Intraspecific Niche Variation is the topic of a NIMBioS Working Group comprised of biologists and mathematicians from universities and other academic institutions across North America and Europe.